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Tue Reverenn S. M. Extis, D. D. 


Memphis, ‘Tennessee 


Author, Lecturer, Pastor and Magazine Writer 





Che ible Tndiswensable 
It Education 


rt 
REVEREND 8S. M. Ettis, D. D. 
Author, Lecturer and Magazine Writer 


God Speaks for Himself 
in His Word 


Published by 
THE NATIONAL REFORM ASSOCIATION 


PirrspurcH, Pa. 





Copyrighted by 
The National Reform Association 
1926 


CONTENTS 


Page 
Publisher's N otevin iii, ai stales tee ene swear ak ga 5 
MOLE WOT” oie lc aiae as eats thle aa ee es at a a 6 
GHA TERRE 
The Welfare of the State Demands the Cultivation 
of Moral? Characteree ** @. tn c.tace 21a 9 
CHAP Rei 
Bible-less Education Fails to Develop the Moral 
Natures ip. ic ee a dele bee aaa ene eae 27 


OHabowedhlae sii Ht 


Objections to the Bible in the State Schools Con- 
SICEredd 45: halsta.s in COE Ree URE lie nal ee AI 


CHAPTER IV 
The: Bible’in the Hands. ofthe (State 3 ae ee 55 


GHAPIRER Vi 
The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction .. 95 
CHAPTER RIV 


The Footprints of Satan Revealed in Movements to 
Banish) the Bible trompthes schools) eee 119 


APPENDIX 


Digest of State Laws which Control the Reading of 
the Bible in: thefPublicgachogls yaa. 4. ee 149 


PUBLISHER’S NOTE 


OR thirty years, the author of this book was a pro- 

minent Baptist minister in Mississippi. He was 

educated at the Virginia Military Institute, Lexing- 

ton, Va.; and at Mississippi College, Clinton, Miss. ; 
graduating there in 1885. Five years later he received 
from that Institution the honorary degree of D.D. He was 
Secretary and Treasurer of the Board of Ministerial 
Education of this Institution for a number of. years; at 
the same time a member of the Board of Trustees. 

Broken health finally caused his retirement from 
active duties of the pastorate. He has resided in Mem- 
phis, Tenn., for several years, devoting his time to 
delivering lectures before the churches. During this 
period he has also been engaged in a study of some of 
the outstanding problems now confronting the public 
welfare, such as Public Morals, the Lord’s Supreme 
Authority in Civil Government, the State’s Obligation 
to render full Moral Training for Citizenship, and other 
vital questions of public interest. He is still active in 
the study of these and similar questions. 

At his request the National Reform Association 
has undertaken the publication of this book. The pub- 
lication committee believes that it will be useful in the 
present country-wide effort to make universal the prac- 
tice of reading the Bible in the public schools. 

The Association does not assume responsibility for 
all of the author’s positions, nor does Doctor Ellis ex- 
pect us so to do, but we send out the book feeling that 
the great fundamental truths in it speak for themselves 
and need only that defense which is furnished by plain 
proclamation, 


FOREWORD 


ORT Y years ago at a teacher’s summer school when 

we were brushing up for an examination for the only 

teacher’s certificate we ever held, the sessions of that 

Institute were frequently enlivened by a debate 
between a Scotch Presbyterian County Superintendent, 
and a Yankee Freethinker high school principal. Their 
bone of contention was, whether a public school teacher 
had any sort of right to read the Bible in tax-supported 
schools. 


Our recollection is, that the Scotchman had the 
best of the argument and we know that the Bible is 
still read in the schools of that county and state. 

Since that time the. opposers of this policy have 
advanced no new argument, but they have _ been 
strengthened in their position by a loose co-operation 
between the followers of Paine, Ingersoll and the Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Atheism, the Roman 
Catholics, the Jews and some Protestant bodies which 
prefer the Parochial school system, to that of the pub- 
lic school. 


Under the sway of an intense individualism that 
was the dynamic of evangelism, the Protestant people 
have offered, until recently a feeble resistance to this 
Opposition to the once universal practice of reading the 
Bible in the schools. Consequently the schools have 
become largely secularized. 

The constitutions and statutory law of all the 
states, guarantee freedom of conscience and worship 
and forbid any church establishment, or any sort of 
union of Church and State. The same is true of the 
Federal Constitution. 


By those opposing the use of the Bible in public 
instruction, these provisions have been construed to for- 
bid this practice. Where they have been able to influ- 
ence legislatures, the courts and boards of ducation 
the Bible has been excluded by one means or another. 


Much water has passed under the bridge since that 
debate of forty years ago. What some of the Scotch 
leaders of a hundred years ago predicted of the Sab- 
bath School has come to pass. It has supplanted home 
instruction, but proven a very inadequate substitute for 
it. It has utterly failed to reach the unchurched portion 
of the community. Moreover the lines between the 
church and the world have been much more sharply 
drawn than in the nineteenth century. The church is 
every year having a more difficult task to reach with 
her message those outside her own ranks. Secularism, 
in the mean time has a generation of opportunity and 
its weakness is becoming evident to all. 


On the other hand, the ground has been partially 
surveyed by the well-known decision of the Federal 
Supreme Court, which declares, “This is a Christian 
Nation.” The tendency of the Parochial school has be- 
come more evident. 


All of these facts have aroused the leaders of real 
American life, to an effort to replace moral and reli- 
gious instruction in the public school system. Under 
their leadership one state after another is making it 
mandatory to read the Bible in the public schools daily. 

This work of Dr. Ellis is a distinct contribution to 
this movement. He has covered the ground and dealt 
with every essential idea of the movement in his own 
inimitable style. We are glad to be co-laborers with 
him in spreading these ideals of our Amrican life. 


Sewickley, Pa. Wm. PARSONS. 


Chy Word ts a lamp unto my feet 


Ann a light unto my path. 
Psalms 119:105 


for the commandment ts a lamp 
Ann the law ts light. 


Prourrhs G:23 


Co the law and to the testimony, 

tf they speak not arrording to this word, 

tt ts because there ts no light in them. 
Isaiah 8:20 


— + CIID «» — 


But liberty and triamyhs on the main, 
And laureled armies not to be withstood; 
What serue they? if on transttory goon 


intent and sedulons of abject gatn—Che 
State, 


Sorbears to shape due channels which the 
floon 


Of sacred truth may enter. 
—Woardswarth 


== eCHW ID e- — 


Enucation, brivfly is the leading of 
human minds and souls to what is right 
and best, and to the making what ts best 


nut of them. 
—RKruskin 


CHAPTER I 


THE WELFARE OF THE STATE DEMANDS THE 
CULTIVATION OF MORAL CHARACTER 


_. Three types of schools exist side by side in America; 
they are private schools, church schools and the public 
schools. These differ in view point, limitations and re- 

sponsibilities, and their differences in these things deter- 
'mine their character and obligations to the public. In 
these pages we shall discuss solely the public schools; 
and seek to establish the premise that the Bible is indis- 
pensable as one of the instruments to be used in their 
work and as part of the subject matter which they must 
teach in order to fulfiil the end of their existence. 

At the outset, let us recall that State Education was 
organized, and has been developed, for the sole purpose 
of training the rising generation for the duties and re- 
sponsibilities of citizenship. It is not to be viewed as an 
organized scheme to confer benefits upon the child, for 
the sake of the child. . The chief design is based upon 
the idea of the State providing for her own welfare and 
safety, the benefits per se, to the child being a by-product, 
not the aim.) This general welfare affords both the right 
and the necessity for the maintenance of the public 
schools at the expense of all property. Thus established, 
and functioning after the original purpose,{ the public 
school is America’s greatest agency for preserving her 
noble ideals and her cherished institutions. Hence it 1s 
of first importance that the curricula of the schools have 
as the chief aim, the present and future welfare of the 


10 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 





State. Or, stated conversely: Nothing must be omitted 
from the school curricula, needful for the best prepara- 
tion of the future citizen. This statement clarifies the 
view and supports the proposition that a complete moral 
training, as found in the moral counsels of the Bible, is 
necessary to the safety and prosperity of the State. 


(1) MoraLt CHARACTER IS, AN ESSENTIAL QUALIFICA- 
( TION FOR Goop CITIZENSHIP 


\ The moral powers, the same as the intellectual 
faculties, must be developed by the common processes 
of teaching and training. | Since the State has need of 
an intelligent citizenship, adequate provision has been 
made to meet this end, through the varied branches for 
intellectual study. But much more is the need of the 
State to develop and train the latent moral powers of the 
child. Failing at this point, there would be revealed a 
serious and radical defect in the policy of State Educa- 
tion. Conscience, the regulative faculty of the moral 
nature, is subject to education, and must be developed 
by moral truth, given from the source and authority of 
moral law, which is God’s morals, given in the Book. 
The moral faculties, as previously noted, are sensitive 
and responsive to the moral quality in an action or a 
teaching, even as the intellect grasps a truth in mathe- 
matics or physics. The State is training the whole 
natural man, in the person of the child, for the one end— 
the good citizen. In this care and training the State 
must ever be mindful that every faculty of the child, 
moral and intellectual, may at some time be called into 
her service. For this reason the school preparation must 
broadly include all the moral and intellectual powers of 


the child. 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character Ti 


The morals of the future citizen are to be begun in 
the nursery, the home. Among the first lessons in the 
rudiments of morals that the mother imparts to her child 
is that of obedience (obedience carries a moral quality.) 
The child nature, marked by trust and obedience, is fitted 
to receive and respond to such instruction. This moral 
quality of obedience is absolutely essential to good citi- 
zenship. The absence of it marks the character of the 
prison inmate and the lawless everywhere. But upon this 
elemental virtue every moral principle may be added; 
and in building upon the primary elements of morals, 
given in varying degree in the home, the school is to 
extend and amplify moral teaching te embrace the full 
system throughout the course of State Education. And 
thus trained after the moral ideals of the Bible, the child 
becomes the nation’s finest asset, measuring above ma- 
terial values. But neglected at this point, that child may 
become the nation’s most serious liability. 


One of the potential foes threatening America’s 
welfare is found in the two groups of the pre-disposed 
lawless, and both in the child state; (1) in the many 
millions of our youth growing up without moral re- 
straints in the home, and its environment, and with only 
the semblance of moral teaching in the school room; (2) 
and the other numerous class is the untrained, unassi- 
milated population of alien birth, fresh from foreign 
lands, bringing low standards of morals, opposed to our 
approved social customs, and for assimilation in the body 
politic require radical training in the principles of demo- 
cracy. These two forces, however variant in class and 
character, present a threatening menace to our govern- 
mental system; and without the reformation and the re- 
construction which the public school is designed to 


J 


12 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 





render, these disintegrating elements within the nat.on 
are given a free hand to effect the downfall of our demo- 
cracy. Now, the only known counter force for the cor- 
recting and overcoming of this nation-wide menace is 
Bible moral teaching in every State school. | 
The peace and happiness, as well as the prosperity 
and patriotism of any people are more securely providec 
for in the rooting of a nation’s youth in the Bible’s sound 
morals than by all the devices and instruments of war. 
And these millions of our own morally benighted youth, 
together with the hordes of the un-American foreigners, 
may be molded into good citizenship only by the melting 
pot of the public school, functioning in the full powers 
of training. The high duties of citizenship in a self 
governing republic demand for such citizens the full 
moral instruction which the public school is empowered 
to render. And it is only by this method of moral train- 
ing that this dangerous liability shall become converted 
to the nation’s best asset,—an upright, intelligent and 
loyal citizen. 


(2) Ture THREATHENED Mora Evits Are _ BEsT 
CoMBATTED BY MoraAL TEACHING 


And that points directly to the school room, as the 
beginning place for this instruction. Whilst a people 
may suffer from the operation of the forces of nature, 
by flood and fire, storm and drouth, even by pestilence, 
yet it is significant that nations do not perish by these 
visitations. The direct cause of a nation’s decline and 
final downfall is found in the immoralities and vices prev- 
alent. The incipiency of lawlessness and crime is to be 
discovered in the tendencies of youth towards the grosser 
immoralities. In the development of a criminal char- 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 13 


acter there is the stage of the flowering, and that follow- 
ing, of matured fruit, (the overt act).. 

The two distinct forces at hand for arantline with 
these evils are the public schools and the police force. 
The first of these is corrective, and has to do with im- 
moral tendencies; with lawlessness in embryo. The other 
force is punitive in its nature, symbolized by the sheriff 
and the jail, as against the teacher and the school house, 
in the former. “The strong arm of the law” has to deal 
with the matured product of those first displayed 1m- 
moral tendencies. The ranks of this latter law-defying 
class may be reduced to the minimum only by the un- 
hampered moral discipline exercised in the school room. 
But the increasing juvenile lawlessness of the age points 
the accusing finger at the public school. Over against 
the jail is the school house. In the failure of the school 
house to function in corrective discipline the jail must 
do double duty in punitive measures. 

The evils that threaten the welfare of the nation 
are to be found in the germinal stage among any people. 
Every country is confronted by incipient evils lurking 
within its borders, awaiting opportunity for development. 
Vice being the same in its essence, finished or unfinished, 
only awaits the favorable conditions for its development. 
In that process moral defections are often unrecognized, 
or ignored as follies of indiscreet youth, until they parade 
as vice in the open, and finally stalk abroad as giant evils, 
menacing the peace and happiness of the whole social 
order. In this connection it is fitting to direct attention 
to the current statement, that 65 percent of the crimes 
of today is committed by boys and girls under 21 years 
of age. Surely such conditions of moral defection among 
our youth make appeal for the most pronounced moral 
teaching in the schools. 


14 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 


The increasing devastations of vice and crime are 
the direct cause of more unhappiness, and more loss 
to the state than all other causes. The wretchedness 
and misery entailed by the prevalent immoral evils upon 
the innocent and the guilty, the disruption of homes, the 
unashamed pollutions that mar family life, the political 
defalcations, the crushing to poverty of the weak by the 
strong in the commercial world; these and other national 
sins are steadily at work, gnawing upon the vitals of our 
social system, thereby imperiling the welfare, if not the 
life, of the nation. These evil forces must be withstood 
and overcome by the corrective moral forces in the 
school, which is the great agency of the state for dealing 
with immorality in the germinal stage. Moral evils 
growing up under the teachings of pernicious error can- 
not flourish where such evils are combatted by the force 
of moral truth. Hence, in the system of public school 
training the state has the most powerful agency for 
destroying the evils that afflict society, and disturb public 
welfare. 

There is not a moral defection menacing the welfare 
of our commonwealth today, but might have been over- 
come in its incipiency by a vigorous moral teaching in the 
school room, which is the first battle-ground of the op- 
posing forces. And it will yet be seen that among the 
supreme tasks of the public school, the safeguarding of 
the rising generation from moral corruption must have 
preeminence. In pursuing such a policy of education her 
successful achievement in this high service would justify 
the institution of State Education as nothing else ever 
done by the public school. The neglect of the state 
schools to render efficient moral teaching presents the 
cause and the explanation of that sub-agency, known as 
the juvenile reform school, which suggests a laundry for 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 15 


the moral renovation of the state schools’ delinquents. 
The neglect of the moral welfare of the child in the 
home and in the school has made the juvenile court a 
necessity. 


(3) STATE ScHoots Must RENDER FuLtL Morar 
TRAINING FOR EFFICIENT PUBLIC SERVICE 


The State 1s served in a gencral way by her citizens 
engaging diligently in the various pursuits of life. An 
industrious, thrifty people given to honest employment, 
and reaping the rewards of gain, is an indirect service 
to the commonwealth, and contributes in no small meas- 
ure to public welfare. But the State is directly served 
in the several departments of public service, in the in- 
stance of police and military duties performed; in every 
court of justice functioning; in every public election 
held, and in those who have been selected to hold an 
office of trust and responsibility. These are the State’s 
trusted agents and servants, and in the performance of 
their duties must offer a good degree of intelligence, and 
an upright moral character. 


Much emphasis has been laid upon the education 
that makes for intelligence and intellectual training for 
these high duties. But while ignorance is characterized 
as a radical disqualification for efficient public service, 
yet it will be readily admitted that moral qualifications 
in all these relations are of paramount value and impor- 
tance to the State. 


In the use of the public schools for this necessary 
intellectual training, the state opens the way, and her 
attitude supports the doctrine, that moral principles must 
be inculcated in the school of preparation. Hence, in 
the conception and purpose of State Education the pub- 


16 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 


lic school is to be, and ought to be the drill ground of 
preparation for al/ the duties of all public service. A 
defective educational policy finally reacts upon every 
public interest. 


Of the several great and distinct tasks of the public 
service devolving upon every citizen, as the State may 
require, each service requires moral qualifications as of 
first importance. These public duties are (1) the exer- 
cise of voting at the ballot, as a citizen sharing the com- 
mon rights and privileges of a democracy, (2) the giving 
of testimony as a witness in courts of justice, (3) the 
services as a juror in trying the rights of property and 
of life, (4) the holding of office when chosen or ap- 
pointed. To these may be added the teacher in the state 
school. For the efficient discharge of these duties in- 
tellectual training alone will not prove adequate to the 
tasks. The voter must not only be able to judge the 
merit of questions of public interest, but the highest 
degree of intelligence will not avail if he sells his vote. 
Suppose a judge possesses a discriminating mind, and 
by superior intellectual training is able to sift and weigh 
testimony to reach a true verdict, and yet accept a bribe 
for an unjust finding. Or what if a witness of fine 
intelligence swear falsely for hire? Or the judge or the 
sheriff disregard his oath of office, and make gain by a 
barter of his official service. These defections, all too 
common, are the bane of modern civilization, and they 
forcibly remind us that democracies flourish only among 
a people of high moral standards. 


PUBLIC SCHOOLS SHOULD HAVE NO RIVALS 


Why should not the state educate al] her youth? The 
all controlling purpose of State Education, justifying the 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 17 


existence of public education, fails when any: great por- 
tion of the school constituency are deprived of those 
ideals that only the state can foster. The essential 
quality of homogeneity of citizenship must have one 
parent source of development; and that is necessarily the 
state school. Church schools, the only rival, have reli- 
gion as their chief aim; and their teaching bears pre- 
eminently the stamp of sectarian religion. State authority 
and prestige are weakened where rival schools flourish 
in the same field. The spirit of patriotism is not exalted 
in the rival school as in the state school. And all those 
fine and distinctly American ideals, engendered in the 
state schools, find no emphasis in rival schools. More- 
over the state is well equipped with officials, trained 
teachers, modern buildings and apparatus, and with 
every resource at hand for further improvement, so that 
the rival school becomes a hindrance rather than an aid. 

Notwithstanding the late United States Supreme 
Court decision, in the Oregon case, denying the right of 
the state to forbid rival schools to the public schools, 
based upon the inherent primitive rights of parents in 
their children, the vital principle in that rejected law 
already holds in other departments of state administra- 
tion, and will ultimately pave the way for outlawing 
rivalry to the public schools. For instance, the Postal 
system, the departments of war, and of finance, hold ex- 
clusive rights in each of these spheres. No organized 


company may transport and deliver mail; nor coin’ 


money, even though measuring up to standard fineness 
of metal; nor fit out and maintain an expedition of war. 
Rival departments in these spheres of government would 
be suppressed, or they would speedily effect a revolution, 
but not more surely, though more slowly, than a rival 
system of education, A private postal system, or a pri- 


18 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 


vately owned mint for the coining of money, would be 


dealt with as a sedition. But in the essence of it the 
rival to the state school is not less seditious, but more so, 
in that it creates a character of peopie developed under 
ideals radically antagonistic to the democratic principles 
of free self government. And it only needs the occasion 
of some great issue arising for a display of allegiance to 
that alien “Supreme Pontiff,’ seated on a throne in the 
Roman Vatican, to effect a crisis, perchance revolution. 
But a people “forewarned are forearmed.” What 
any free people want, or do not want, they finally, in 
the democratic way get it and make it secure by writing 
their will in such laws and enactments as will be upheld 
by the courts. A democracy,’ such as ours, may re-write 
its constitutional law, as well as its statutory laws. And 
as it may, with proper limitations, set up any law it may 
want, we may expect that sooner or later the rival to 
the state school, called “Parochial school,’ or by any 
other name will be outlawed as obstructionary to state 
policies. The American public school cannot be aided 
by an organized system of education under the control 
of a foreign religious hierarchy, whose government and 
whose spirit are those of autocracy, not democracy. 
The parochial school that essays rivalry to the finest 
educational system known to man, has nothing of glory 
to its credit, either in Europe or America. Rome’s un- 
opposed educational sway in every Catholic country of 
Europe, has nothing to show, after centuries, but a back- 
ward immoral people, afflicted with ignorance, squalor, 
serfdom, political bondage and strife without end, and 
such abject poverty as prosperous America has no con- 
ception. Such degrading conditions are in the main 
even worse throughout South and Central America and 
Mexico, where Rome’s religion and education have from 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 10 


the beginning had no rival. In setting up to educate 
in every Catholic country, Rome can point with pride 
to no country on the globe. ‘The illiteracy of Mexico 
and all South America ranges from 50 to 75 percent of 
the population; whilst the United States and Canada, 
Protestant countries, show eight percent and eleven per- 
cent of the people to be illiterate. The illiteracy of the 
Catholic countries of Southern Europe, in contrast with 
those Protestant peoples of Northern Europe, makes no 
better showing for Rome’s schools. Liberty and demo- 
cracy are not the achievements of Romanism anywhere 
on earth. The fruit of her teachings, through her 
parochial schools, has cursed all Southern Europe, and 
half the New World with illiteracy, political bondage, 
immorality and poverty. In the face of this unbroken 
record of centuries this political hierarchy, wearing the 
mask of religion, opposes State Education, and sets up 
in opposition by maintaining schools in rivalry to the 
state schools. Hence, this great fee of public education 
must be banished. America’s public schools must have 
the unopposed right of way to mold our youth into the 
needful high type of homogeneous, patriotic citizenship 
for the safeguarding of our Republic. 

But the rival schools, though an_ obstructionary 
menace, could not care for more than ten percent of 
the school population. Hence the burden of training our 
future citizenry still lies upon the state schools. Civic 
pride, the spirit of liberty and those high moral qualities 
for good citizenship, must be the product of State Edu- 
cation; and that class of citizenry, so trained, is destined 
to hold supremacy in the nation’s life. 

The state is under necessity to keep abreast her own 
fine ethical laws by the moral power she may exert 
through a nation-wide system of moral teaching. That 


20 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 


system must embrace the Divine Moral Commandments 
and their application to our social and civic laws. And 
since every court of justice in its orderly functioning, 
teaches moral truth by its expositions of the law, and by 
the enforcement of the penalties for transgressing law, 
the state in another department of service, the public 
schools, must also expound and enjoin morals. Each of 
these departments of the state is fitted in a distinctive 
way to give moral instruction. Adults are the learners 
in the one, and children in the other. In the complete 
functioning of the school the youth acquires those ethical 
and moral principles that the delinquent adult should have 
learned in the school room, but is now learning at the 
court house, and in a “school of adversity,” with bitter 
experience added. Had the law offender back in his 
school days learned to respect and obey law as a moral 
principle, he would not in adult life have to learn the 
lessons in that more rigorous school (penal servitude) of - 
the force of those inflexible laws when visited in retribu- 
tion upon the offender. 


THE EDUCATIVE POWER OF MORAL LAW 


Moral law teaches more impressively than truth 
existing in other realms, for the reason that moral truth 
engages both the moral and intellectual powers. It 
teaches youth through its rewards for obedience, and 
when the duty has been performed confirms the teaching 
through an approving conscience. But the offender is 
taught through penalties inflicted for the offense. In 
either case it teaches. As learners, the former class have 
the advantage of an impressible moral nature; while the 
latter, the offender, is under the disadvantage of a per- 
verted conscience (made so by moral transgression), and 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 21 


a discordant moral nature; out of harmony with God’s 
moral law. One is taught and learns by the force of 
moral truth, and through reward for obedience. The 
other is also taught, but is a slow learner; punishment 
as a penalty is his teacher. However, in either state 
moral truth seeks to educate, but gives emphasis to the 
Divine teaching, that in the days of youth the Creaior 
must be remembered; and that “it is good that a man 
bear the yoke in his youth;’—the yoke of moral 
discipline. 

In this connection it is fitting to observe that the 
moral law is most powerfully exemplified in the great 
personalities of the Bible. Unquestionably the moral 
heroes of the Bible offer the most attractive and most 
convincing method of presenting moral truth. The force 
and beauty of morals as set forth in the varied characters 
of the Scriptures are illustrative, convincing and appeal- 
ing to a degree not found in didactic moral teaching. 
Moral conduct in conformity with moral law, is a trans- 
cript of the law, an interpretation of its meaning. Only 
the God-man, Jesus Christ, gave the perfect and com- 
plete exemplification of the exactions of the law by a 
conformity in letter and spirit that was flawless. He 
who came and fulfilled the law by obedience to the law, 
has honored it and exalted it for every life. His exposi- 
tions of the law, together with his perfect conformity, 
have revealed God’s moral standard in concrete, to give 
it a new and profound meaning. Hence, the educative 
power of God’s moral law is set forth in the highest ex- 
pression of it as displayed in the ineffable moral life of 
Jesus,—the most beautiful of all the ages. 

Legislation based on the Ten Commandments, as are 
all our ethical laws, logically necessitates the authorita- 
tive teaching of those Commandments. It remains yet 


22 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 





to be demonstrated that a system of sound and compre- 
hensive moral teaching can be developed apart from 2 
direct use of God’s moral law. The first fruits of school 
training in those states which have dispensed with the 
sible in their schools, are confessedly disappointing. In 
those states failing to sow the wheat of moral truth in 
the child’s nature, the enemy has sowed tares. The moral 
counsels of the Bible are as needful in the school room 
as in the court room and the legislative hall. Even more 
so, since it is in that field where moral teaching deals 
with character in the making, and where moral founda- 
tions for efficient public service are to be laid in the future 
lawmaker, the judge, the witness and the juror, as in no 
other sphere. Child life affords the drill period, and the 
school room the drill ground for that moral furnishing 
so necessary to the service of our country, in war or in 
peace, in public or in private life, from the humble toiler 
to the nation’s chief executive. 


(4) Tue ScHOOLS ARE THE CureF Mepium For PER- 


PETUATING THE MORALS OF THE NATION. 


The nation grapples with no problem of more con- 
sequence than that of perpetuating her spirit and char- 
acter, as embodied in her laws and customs, and as ex- 
pressed in her splendid institutions. Her laws, her 
literary and benovolent institutions, her statues in parks 
and in halls of fame, standing like sentries on duty (as 
they are), her memorial monuments, with immortal prin- 
ciples graven thereon; her wealth of state papers from 
Washington to Wilson and Harding, that exalt righteous- 
ness, and breathe the noblest spirit of every civic virtue— 
all these things serve to teach and to perpetuate the 
spirit and the moral character of the nation. It is through 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 23 





these channels of influences that we seek to preserve and 
perpetuate those noble sentiments that give distinction 
and glory to our national life. 

But we must go further than that of creating insti- 
tutions, framing and building a mighty government and 
erecting monuments and memorials expressive of a 
nation’s sentiments. We ought, and we must, in the 
more effectual and more enduring way transmit these 
ideals and principles through the rising generation to our 
posterity. Every principle inhering in our national life 
is to be preserved and perpetuated by inculcating it 
in the schools. Our democracy has withstood the severest 
tests of adversity and prosperity, of war and peace. It 
has even been able to absorb and assimilate the millions 
of aliens coming to our lands—and doubtless this has 
proven the severest test—and by the contagious spirit 
pervading our national life, the foreigner finally becomes 
a partaker with us, and a partner in our self government. 
He becomes liberated from the degrading ideals of mon- 
archies, with their lords and kings, their fixed higher 
and lower classes, their government ownership of the 
individual, that makes for thralldom and semi-slavery ; 
and finally he becomes naturalized to his new relation of 
civil and religious liberty, as he had never dreamed or 
hoped: And in the melting pot of the public school the 
foreigner’s child acquires the teaching and the spirit that 
prepare him to become a full American citizen. In view 
of this severest test, if it be asked, what is the greatest 
instrumentality for inculcating and perpetuating Ameri- 
ca’s lofty principles? The one and only answer is, THE - 
AUN SA WA OSS Od ve COTO) Be 

But the finest attainment of the American nation is 
that of her moral character. By the principle enunciated 
above, for the perpetuation of that cherished acquisition, 





24 Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 


we are of necessity bound to train the coming generation 
to adopt and practice those lofty virtues which have oper- 
ated more effectually for our upbuilding than all other 
influences. 

The outstanding features of the moral character of 
our nation embrace the fundamental principles of moral 
law as embodied in the Ten Commandments, such as 
obedience to law, human and Divine, regard for the 
family institution, the sacredness of oaths, the sanctity 
of the Lord’s day, the sacredness of life, the right of 
property, moral purity, temperance, honesty in action 
and speech. All these virtues have found expression in 
our laws; they are commanded of every one, and they 
are enforced by our courts. Our pure laws distinguish 
us among all the nations of earth. The moral virtue of 
the people is a bed rock foundation of all our welfare; 
and it is the indisputable necessity upon the nation to 
train her future citizens in these great moral principles 
which have wrought so powerfully for her own moral 
character, and have given her a moral prestige among 
the nations of the earth. 

And finally, since the most important elements com- 
posing the character of our nation are moral, the state 
must perpetuate those distinct traits by a full and faith- 
ful moral teaching in her public schools. And since our 
nation has been built upon the Bible, and adheres to the 
morals of that Book, it 1s her unquestionable right to 
teach, and an unavoidable obligation to transmit to her 
posterity, the cherished fruit of its teaching. Surely no 
one can gainsay the right of every people to pass on to 
successive generations those principles in their own 
moral character which have wrought so powerfully for 
happiness and prosperity, and for the commanding posi- 
tion of influence and power in the world, Negligence 


Welfare of State Demands Moral Character 2 








of this duty would prove recreancy to a trust most vital 
and most sacred. 

Our nation has at command no agency so perfectly 
adapted to the perpetuating of these underlying moral 
principles as the public schools. “Since moral character 
is the chief element in good citizenship, and since this 
element may not be obtained by any other method than 
by training through educational processes, we are led to 
the unavoidable conclusion that the public schools must, 
in the purpose of the institution, render the needful moral 
training for good citizenship. And in so doing the state 
is perpetuating her own ideals and principles in the living 
characters of a morally trained people far more effec- 
tively than through institutions and laws. 


Chon through thy commandments 
Gast made nie wtser than mine enemies, 
Hor they are curr with me. 


{ have more understanding than all my teachers 
Sor thy testimonies are my meditation. 


{ understand more than the Ancients 
HBecrause tf keep thy precepts. 
Psalms 119:98-100 


— + Cll a es — 


Nor yet tf spirtinal things 

Ge lost through apathy, or scorn or fear 

Shalt thou thy hunthle franchises support, 

MHoweurr hardly won or justly dear: 

What came from heaven to heaven justly cling, 

And tf Nisseurrend thence, tts course ts short. 
Wordsworth 


_ © Co! 12> os — 


Enucate men without religion and you 
ake them but clever Deutls. 
Wellington 


— Gabi» — 


for their learning be liberal. Spare no 
cost; for by such parstmtony all ts lost that ts 
sauen; but let tt be useful knowledge, such as 
is consistent with truth and godliness. 
Win. Penn 


CHAPTER II 


Pie Seer IO Nana TI oe OnE VELOE 
THE MORAL NATURE 


“SECULAR” EDUCATION DEFINED 


The “secular” theory proposes a system of educa- 
tion without having God in it. It would not boldly deny 
the existence of the Supreme Being, but assumes that 
the Divine existence is not a necessary factor in educa- 
tional training. In this attitude it would ignore the in- 
culcation of the elemental religious truths, such as obe- 
dience, moral purity, self control, right and justice, and 
human accountability to the Creator, all of which are 
rooted in the Bible. It proposes to teach morality only 
as an expediency which is supported by public opinion 
rather than upon Divine authority; just a “crazy quilt” 
presentation of human conventions, expressed in maxims, 
and having no higher moral constraint than that of ad- 
vice or persuasion. From this “secular” viewpoint, sin 
is not to be condemned in the school room, however 
heinous be the overt act, or because of the Divine Moral 
Law, “thou shalt not,” but because of the injury that 
sin works retroactively upon the doer in its corrupting 
power. The heathen philosopher Plato, a blind teacher 
leading the blind, first advanced that doctrine. But his 
moral reflections being devoid of an authority sufficient 
to influence the moral nature, the Athenians were left 
helpless in vice. 

History furnishes no account of a successful edu- 
cational policy anywhere which ignores God’s moral 


28 Bible-less Education Fails 





teachings in the school room. But it does record the 
downfall of some of the great nations of modern times, 
as chargeable to a false system of moral education. In 
the overthrow of the dynasties of the last three great 
monarchical empires of Europe, their destruction 1s 
clearly traceable to imperfect and perverted moral teach- 
ing in their public schools. Within fifty years the fruit 
of Nietsche’s horrible teaching was brought forth in the 
radical transformation of the peace loving Germans in- 
to warriors, maddened for world conquest. Bolshevic 
Russia is today training her rising generation by a God- 
less and moral-less education for her own undoing, and 
possibly for world chaos. 


(1) THE “SrecuLar”’ THEorY IGNorEsS MAn’s DIVINELY 


IMPLANTED MorAL NATURE 


Man’s sense of right and wrong identifies him with 
a moral nature, and such as is possessed in perfection 
only by the God of Revelation. He is endowed with a 
moral conscience that renders him capable of respond- 
ing to the urge of duty. His moral faculties are related 
to God’s moral law somewhat as the eye is to light, or 
the ear to sound. But his moral, as well as his intellec- 
tual faculties must be developed; and they may be, but 
only by processes of educational training, whether in the 
home or in the school room. The one source of all 
moral truth is in God; and that is given in His Revela- 
tion. Anonymous moral teaching is less than moral 
teaching. It is like the coin with its superscription 
effaced; it is without value and without moral power. 
In the last analysis the stamp of Divine authority is 
necessary to the inculcation of moral truth. Apart from 
the Divine imprimature the coin of moral truth sinks to 


Bible-less Education Fails 29 


the level of a moral apothegm. In moral law the Who- 
said-it must appear; and when found to bear God’s stamp 
of authority, the moral sense responds. But under a less 
authority only the intellectual faculties respond. 

Confronted by conditions of the high moral devel- 
opment of America’s citizenship, with laws, customs, 
ethical ideals and institutions rooted in God’s Revelation, 
it is now proposed that the Divine Teacher and His Text 
Book be ignored in the school room; the child be edu- 
cated as an intellectual animal. It is even contended 
that the child’s moral nature concerns only the Church, 
because morals are vital to the Church and religion. 
They forget that morals are just as vital to the State, 
and that a high standard of moral character in the people 
is indispensable to a republican government. A nation 
in thus ignoring the Divine order in education, would 
pave the way for its moral declension, and would there- 
by invite its own disaster. Yet it is proposed that this 
Bible made nation undertake to transmit her ideals, her 
spirit and her principles of government to posterity with- 
out transmitting the chief instrumentality that developed 
her own character. The undertaking would prove a 
vain experiment. 


(2) “SECULAR” EDUCATION TAKES NO ACCOUNT OF THE 
Mora CHARACTER OF THE STATE 


The State is a moral body, not organically, but in- 
stitutionally. The evidence of this fact is revealed in 
its power to do right or wrong. God holds nations to a 
moral accountability. This is affirmed, and demonstrated 
by His favor upon righteous governments, and His judg- 
ments upon nations that disregard His laws. “The judg- 


d 


ments of God are in all the earth,’ and “the nation that 


30 Bible-less Education Fails 





will not serve thee shall perish,’ have no other meaning 
than God’s retributive justice visited upon nations given 
over to a disregard of His laws. Since our government 
defines crime, enacts laws to punish crime, decides moral 
questions, provides for the moral welfare of the people, 
especially of the young, a suitable preparatory training 
of the rising generation thereby becomes a necessity.” The 
moral standards of any people are found in their laws 
and customs, their memorials and institutions. Their 
perpetuation is chiefly through the inculcation given the 
pupils in the school room. It is here that the State’s 
future citizenry begin under an educational training for 
civic duties; and civic duties require the highest degree 
of moral character; and there is no other way of attaining 
moral character, except through moral instruction from 
authoritative sources. The oft quoted saying of Hum- 
boldt strengthens the contention, that “whatever you 
would have appear in the future of a nation you must 
put into its schools.” 

The chief right of the State to maintain public edu- 
cation is that it may render to the youth of the whole 
country the necessary educational training for good 
citizenship. Apart from this all-controlling purpose it 
is doubtful if the State is justified in maintaining the 
institution of public education. Although the only known 
method of the moral training of the entire child popula- 
tion is by the means of our system of state education, 
yet it is proposed that the State abandon a system of 
more than a century’s test of merit, and in substitution 
adopt a program of education that virtually ignores the 
moral nature, and directs the school training to those 
studies which engage only the intellectual faculties. In 
such an issue the alternative is forced upon us, that we 
must have either the public school with the Bible for 


Bible-less Education Fails at 


moral instruction and guidance, or a program of educa- 
tion that is destitute of moral truth as a system. One 
policy or the other must ultimately prevail; for there 
is no other, and the one stands in radical opposition to 
the other. 


The rejection of the moral counsels direct from 
the Bible, is tantamount to the final abandonment of 
any system of moral teaching in the school room. This 
statement is supported by the curricula of those schools 
that formally reject the Bible. Where is the public school 
anywhere having a defined and extended course of 
moral teaching that rejects the Bible in its program? On 
the other hand, where is the Bible-less school that em- 
phasizes moral teaching? However, it is consistent that 
if the fountain of moral truth be rejected, then that 
which may flow from the fountain will also be rejected. 
There is no substance for the Bible in any sphere of its 
ministry; certainly none for its moral counsels. Any 
formulated system of moral teaching must find its force 
and value in the authority behind it. Anonymous moral 
teaching lacks the “thus said-the-Lord;” and hence it 1s 
powerless and well nigh valueless. 


(3) Morat-Less FEpucaTIon TRIED OUT AND. FouND 
WANTING 


It is to be forever insisted that the supreme quality 
for citizenship under a republican government is sound 
moral character. Every exercise of the varied duties of 
citizenship, from public service to that of personal con- 
duct in obeying the law, calls for a moral action. The 
moral nature of the citizen is unequal to these tasks and 
duties without a development through processes of train- 
ing. The virtue of conformity to moral law is not an 


aD Bible-less Education Fails 





endowment through birth, nor a product of good en- 
vironment, helpful as that may prove; nur may it be 
developed under any system of God-less and moral-less 
education that may be devised. The moral nature grows 
only by the nurture of the Divine moral counsels, and 
the exercise of conforming to those counsels. That 
nature becomes anemic when fed on the stale bread of 
conventional morals and the anonymous moral maxims 
of the times. And yet these are the best that is offered 
for the moral training of our future citizenry by any 
system that the “secular” education offers. 

The policy of this “secular” or Bible-less education 
has been tried out for more than a score of years in 
many of the larger cities of the country, and in some 
of the States having a preponderance of Catholic and for- 
eign population. Its baneful fruit is seen in the lowered 
moral standards everywhere and in every class. Where 
such educational training prevails, there the moral 
dwarfs abound. This sickening situation is revealed in 
the frightful increase of vice and crime among youth. 
The God-less home and the Bible-less school account for 
the vicious tendencies of untrained and unrestrained 
youth. “The strong arm of the law” has not hitherto 
been a necessary force for the care and restraint of 
youth; and it is but a just indictment to charge this 
defection of youthful lawlessness to the neglect of their 
moral training, both in the home and in the school room. 
This “secular” education in many of the public schools 
stands before the world a failure. It is without a demon- 
stration of success anywhere. And judged by its evil 
fruit, and by its barrenness of good fruit, it is time to 
“confess judgment,” abandon the policy, and reform the 
public schools by a return to the former true and tried 


Bible-less Education Fails 33 








system of employing the Holy Bible for the inculcation 
of moral truth. That policy has stood all the tests. 


(4) SupeERFICIAL MoraL TEACHING HAS ALSO FAILED 
TO MEET THE ENDS oF PuBLIC EDUCATION 


The “secular” policy of education rejects the direct 
use of the Bible for inculcating moral truth, yet under- 
takes to enforce Bible morals by rules and regulations, 
by the use of current moral proverbs, and by moralizing 
upon the evils and crimes of today. The teacher may 
solemnly declare to the pupil that it never pays to lie, 
or cheat or steal; that such evil doing is disgraceful and 
hurtful of one’s good standing, but such admonitions 
and counsels are devoid of the property of a moral obli- 
gation. They are not given as Bible authority, and hence 
have a less urge than a moral commandment from the 
Bible. A thousand years of such vapid, authorless moral- 
izing would not substantially influence the moral nature, 
as would one utterance of God’s “thou-shalt-nots”’ 
solemnly directed to the moral conscience of the child 
in training. It is true that such moralizing and such 
good advice may temporarily influence conduct, but it 
can never reach the sources of moral life for affecting 
character. 

The God-less and moral-less policy of education has | 
certainly had a fair trial for demonstrating its merit over 
the former course in the use of the Bible in the schools. 
The morals of this generation of youth have reached a 
stage in the downgrade that has no parallel in the history 
of public education. Authentic statistics from the bureau 
of Government Sanitation on the immoral vices and the 
consequent venereal diseases found in many of the 
city public schools, simply stagger credulity. And this 
shocking degradation is further re-enforced by well ac- 


34 Rible-less Education Fails 





credited data showing that 65 percent of the crimes of 
this day are committed by boys and girls between the 
ages of 14 and 21. The school boy bandit, unheard of 
in former times, is the indirect product of this modern 
education which dispenses with the Book that restrains 
immoral tendencies, and constrains to right living as no 
other instrumentality under heaven. The policy of this 
“secular” education, tried and found wanting, ought to 
be rejected forever; and it would be abandoned, but for 
want of a comprehensive grasp of all true moral train- 
ing in its relation to the source and authority of moral 
truth. This nation has been built upon the moral prin- 
ciples of the Bible. It will be preserved only by a faith- 
ful adherence to those principles. And the direct means . 
of the preservation of the nation’s ideals and principles 
is the continuance of the Bible in America’s public 
schools. 


(5) THe “SrecuLtar’ ProGRAM Faits to MEET THE 
PURPOSE OF STATE EDUCATION 


One of the baffling problems now engaging the 
thought of educators, statesmen and religious leaders, is 
the steady decline of the moral support of law among 
the masses, and how to arrest it. There is confessedly 
a need for a law abiding spirit among the masses; not 
merely a perfunctory acquiescense to avoid the penalties 
for transgressing, but an obedience for conscience sake; 
an obedience because disobedience is tmmoral. Con- 
formity to law in the high sense requires that the law 
be understood, and the reasons underlying it be morally 
approved. This statement brings us to face the fact that 
the chief reason for very many of our laws is a reli- 
gious reason, for instance, those laws regarding per- 
jury and blasphemy, Sabbath desecration, the undis- 


Bible-less Education Fails 35 


turbed right of public worship, parental authority in 
family government. All these offenses are violations of 
laws whose principles are rooted in the moral teachings 
of the Bible, and from whence they are derived. They 
compose a large body of our laws; and they demand for 
their support an understanding of their source in the 
Divine counsels; and a moral training there in the 
education of our youth. 

Again, the moral character of any people must de- 
termine the scope of their school training. America must 
necessarily train her youth after her own ideals and 
institutions. But this she is not doing except in the most 
superficial way. The broad elemental and unsectarian 
principles of religion are to be found in the whole fabric 
of our government. They appear in the charters of 
government in our first colonies, in the original consti- 
tution of the United States, in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and in the Articles of Confederation. Such 
acknowledgments are also found in many of the State 
Constitutions. These precedents have opened the way 
for many of the established usages, such as prayers in 
our legislative bodies, the National Thanksgiving Day, 
and the calling of the nation to prayer in times of war 
and pestilence. These religious principles, priceless 
though they be, will ultimately be lost to us if they shall 
not be further developed and perpetuated through our 
system of school training. | 


(60) Tue Reticious QUALITY oF THE OatH Must BE 
INCULCATED IN THE SCHOOLS 

Was there ever an emphasis given this teaching in 

the modern school room? Indeed it is doubtful if many 

have given it the first serious consideration. An essen- 

tial property in the corner stone of our democratic gov- 


30 Rible-less Education Fails 





ernment is TRUTH,—truth as a virtue, and as a moral 
quality in the individual. This essentially moral act is 
demanded of every one who may be summoned to a 
public service of trust to his country. Its expression 1s 
in the solemnly pronounced oath before an officer of the 
government. The very stability of our institutions rests 
upon the integrity of those who make oath. Every in- 
terest of our social and civil structure, even the sacred- 
ness and safety of human life, hang upon truth solemnly 
affirmed in the form of an oath. And what is an oath but 
a religious act, an appeal to God as witness to the solemn 
vow or affirmation, an imprecation to God as Judge to 
visit in judgment him who speaks a lie for the truih? 
It is God’s Book that invests this action with moral 
dignity and sacred value both to the State and to the 
individual. Hence, by the adoption and use of the oath 
the State links itself with the Divine Throne. The lad 
in the school room should be so instructed, and made 
to understand its significance. 

In the school room the embryo citizen who is taught 
the elements of civil government, should learn from the 
Divine Word, the original source, that truth is moral and 
sacred, as a lie is immoral and accursed; that God re- 
quires truth in word, in vow, in promise and in action; 
and that the official oath is a recognition of the God 
of truth and judgment, with a solemn imprecation to 
Him as the Judge. And the whole body of society, 
seniors and juniors, should learn also that the oath has 
value only as expressed by those who are morally intel- 
ligent; that it rises to its highest value only when 
founded on conviction formed by God’s Word, and is 
meaningless and worthless coming from the atheist, or 
from one who rejects the Divine Counsels. 


Bible-less Education Fails 37 


We may therefore understand that the value of the 
civil oath is in its religious source and intent; and that 
its value is in its religious quality and nothing else. Yet 
it is proposed that the State train up a citizenship with- 
out knowledge of the source and authority for the sacred 
vow. The inevitable harvest to follow such neglect 
would make sure a generation of what the Buble 
frankly calls, liars. This investigation, however, leads 
us to apprehend that truth is more than sentimentality. 
It is invested with a high degree of moral quality. Truth 
is a positive virtue, finding expression in moral action; 
and when rooted in the principles of God’s moral teach- 
ings this element of man’s moral nature becomes devel- 
oped to a degree that is impossible under other influences. 


SUMMARY 


To recapitulate: The curricula of the State school 
proposed by the secularist fails to comprehend the 
moral nature of the child; it ignores completely the 
moral nature of the State; it lays upon the teacher no 
necessity to square his instruction with that moral 
nature; it has failed in the task of préducing moral 
character and the increasing lawlessness of youth is 
justly chargeable to its defective education. It assumes 
that this is not a Christian nation, but only one with 
a predominating Christian element and that all other 
faiths must stand in exactly the same relation to the 
government; that the nation is not amenable to God 
in the sense of accountability, and therefore, not 
subject to Divine judgments; that the purpose of 
State education is primarily to free the nation of 
illiteracy, and to provide a popular intelligence for 
moral and religious training to follow, through the 
agency of the organized religious bodies. 


38 Bible-less Education Fails 


Thus it 1s seen that this minority element proposes 
an educational program that would forbid an expression 
of loyalty and fidelity to our national ideals and prin- 
ciples. It would establish a policy of education so 
devoid of these moral and religious principles, and so 
completely severed from God’s Treasury of counsel and 
wisdom, that our splendid government would within one 
school generation pass into the hands of a people who, 
in ignorance of history, would ignore the claims of the 
Builder of our civilization. But as surely as “coming 
events cast their shadow before,” this proposed system 
of God-less and Bible-less education would pave a broad 
road to a yet further moral downgrade of the nation. 
There are not two or more moral standards of Bible 
promulgation, one for the individual and one for the 
State. God’s one standard of right holds every moral 
action to accountability, whether the act be that of the 
individual or that of organized society in the form of 
a government. ‘The powers that be are ordained of 
(sod;” and such powers are answerable to God for a 
disregard of His laws. The State can no more with 
impunity lie, steal, oppress the innocent, shield wrong 
doers, pervert justice and such like sins, than the in- 
dividual may thus defy God. In the sight of God an 
immoral act is an offense, and the doer is held account- 
able whether a body of people or an individual. “Though 
hand join in hand the wicked shall not be unpunished.” 
Under Divine judgments those nations that ignored His 
law were blotted out. Yet in the face of every Divine 
admonition, and every warning of history, it is proposed 
that we leave God out of America’s school rooms. For, 
if we leave the Bible out, it is in effect to shut God 
out. Such blind folly would open the way to our nation’s 
ultimate and hopeless undoing. Our Christian civiliza- 
tion cries out in protest, 


eer oe 


aa e 


4 bs . t's ' 
ey. Ceara "Ohh DRE MAL Ee 


fr} » ie 


; OT oe sy ? 


1 


avhh’ 





/ Train up a child in the way he should go, 
And when he ts old, he will not Depart from itt. 
Proverbs 22:6 


Anat thon shalt teach them Ddtligently unto thy 
children, and thou shalt talk of them when 
thou stttest in thine house, and when thou 
walkest by the way and when thou liest Omun 
ann when thou risest up. 

Deuteronomy G:7 


ee o SIND ©» — 


Slaues to the sect, who deem the heavenly light, 
Chrough one small taper cheers the moral 
night, 
Which should tt fatl to throw tts radttant spark 
Would leaue the hapless nations in the dark. 
| —Saxe 


— Qu» — 


Most of the objections to the use of the 
Bible by the public school teachers, are based 
upon the false assumption that the church has 
a monopoly on this book, and they fail to take 
into account the interest of the State in un- 
churrhed people. 


Wm. Parsons 


CHAPTER III 


OB) ROVIONG TOOTHE BIBLEIIN: THE STATE 
SCHOOLS CONSIDERED 


In the progress of every moral movement we find 
that its triumphs have been achieved by the force of 
truth in the aggressive, not in the defensive. Opposi- 
tion more often finds expression as a negative force, 
as the mountain does in its inertia. In the persistent 
struggle moral principles must often do battle with both 
positive and negative forces. There has been no distinct 
moral progress without the conflict of these opposing 
forces. They are symbolized as light and darkness. The 
moral quality that reveals itself in any great issue, in- 
variably sets these forces in opposition; and the out- 
come is life or death. 


In the conflict of the true and the false, the truth 
must become the aggressor. “Things wrong will never 
set themselves right.” The policy of error, once estab- 
lished, is that of opposition in the defensive. The “let- 
us-alone”’ wail found expression from “the pit,’ when 
the poor demon-possessed human wreck voiced that cry, 
as the evil spirit was being routed of his habitation by 
command of the Lord of all spirits. That statu-quo 
policy has been echoed and re-echoed through the ages, 
ever serving the cause of darkness, but never that of 
truth and light. It yet finds expression in the modified 
phrases, “let well enough alone,” “I am opposed to it,” 
“its too radical,” “I am afraid of it,” and other similar 
expressions. But back of all such is not some unex- 


42 Objections to Bible Considered 


pressed controlling principle, but a prejudice bankrupt 
of any other expression than the old time worn and 
never failing talisman,—/ am against it. And in the 
mind of such an one, that settles it. The simple dictum 
of many of our ecclesiastical and political leaders is 
received as an oracle by multitudes of the unthinking. 
But those who think for themselves, however crudely, 
finally form opinions of their own; and if they think 
further and deeper the matured conviction is the out- 
come. 


Those who oppose the Bible in the public schools 
are not in agreement on any line of opposition. Some 
oppose on religious grounds; others on the unfitness of 
many of the teachers for reading a Bible lesson to pupils; 
others that the place and the moral atmosphere of a 
public school forbid a becoming sanctity for Bible in- 
fluence upon the moral nature of the child. But none 
of these may be classed among the weighty objections 
that deal with the real issue, which is, the fitness or the 
unfitness of the Bible, in its own words, for imparting its 
moral counsels. Of all the objections brought to the 
attention of the author, not one appears to meet the real 
issue, in the underlying purpose of state education, or 
in the natural rights of the child in the matter of its 
normal training, or of the vast scope of the Bible as a 
guide and counsellor to man in every sphere of this 
life. Objections in the main are based upon a false pre- 
mise, or are specious, in dealing with a minor phase 
of the question rather than the issue as a whole. With 
a contracted vision such persons seem unable to con- 
template enlarging life as the product of combined moral 
and intellectual training; neither the finer civilization 
that emphasized moral education begets, nor the new 


Objections to Bible Considered 43 





display of the most powerful and most serviceable Book 
in the world. 


OBJECTIONS ANSWERED 


(1) Tue Averace Pusric ScHoor TEACHER Lacks 
FITNESS TO USE THE BIBLE 


The idea with the objector is that some teachers 
may have every needful qualification for a proper use 
of the Bible in the class room, but as others may lack 
fitness, therefore, the Bible must be barred, and kept 
barred until all the teachers measure up to an approved 
standard for such service. Of course, this specious ob- 
jection involves no principle. In opposing a branch of 
a tree the objector must not uproot the tree. This class 
of objections belongs to the details, and may be cor- 
rected without destroying the system. No fundamental 
principle is involved. The same specious reasoning ap- 
plied to Christianity would close every house of worship 
in the Divine Kingdom. Because there are some preach- 
ers who are unfit, we do not insist that preaching cease. 
The teacher is not required to give expositions of the 
Scriptures to the classes, neither lecture upon the lesson, 
explain or expound it, but simply to read the words as 
God has given them, thus letting the Bible speak its own 
message to the understanding, as it will. Moreover, the 
State in exercising the power to select the teachers, 
may determine who may and who may not -teach, with 
an eye to fitness for the highest duty in the school 
room,—the intelligent and sympathetic reading of. the 
Bible to the assembled school. As hitherto every stand- 
ard of qualification required of teachers has been met, 
it will be found that the unfit teacher will become fit, 
or will be eliminated. 


44 Objections to Bible Considered 


(2) VIEWED BY SOME AS DESTROYING PoPULAR RE- 
SPECT AND VENERATION FOR THE BIBLE 


A much proclaimed objection, coming from a con- 
servative element of Church people, is their fear that 
such every day popular use of the Bible in school as- 
emblies would mar its sacredness, divest the Book of 
its inherent majesty, and thereby weaken its influence 
over the rising generation. And others of this class in- 
sist that a perfunctory use of the Bible by a teacher 
not in sympathy with the service, would provoke the 
contempt and derision of the pupils to the extent of a 
permanent evil effect upon their minds. But these fears 
are imaginary, and are groundless. The Bible courts 
publicity; challenges all thinking, all conduct. Its mis- 
sion is to mankind, bearing a message to every indi- 
vidual of every class, even to thieves and bandits in 
their conclaves, to the courtesans of the brothel, to 
gamblers in their rendezvous, to prisoners and to all the 
habitues of darkness among men. In such a varied 
ministry the Bible becomes neither disparaged in the 
public mind, nor contaminated by shedding its light in 
dens of vice; no more than the sun in the heavens is 
affected by shining upon garbage in a pig stye. In its 
effort to reach all classes the Bible refuses not the bill 
board, the screen, the daily paper, the street car, the 
wayside rock. And since the Book bears a_ fruitful 
ministry in all these ways, and to all classes, losing 
none of its majesty and power in the service, why should 
we single out the assemblies of our youth in the schools, 
to object to its ministry there? What further test should 
be required, after having merited the tribute, now uni- 
versally conceded, of being everybody's Book? If there 
has ever been an experimental stage of its fitness to 


Objections to Bible Considered 4s 


guide and counsel mankind, it has long since under every 
conceivable demonstration triumphantly endured the 
test. In the light of its teachings we may understand 
that only the pit of darkness in the world of woe, is 
denied its marvelous ministry. But if there be any other 
place than God’s eternal prison from which the Bible 
has been barred, it is certainly not the school room. 
The bogey of the mocking teacher, a mere appari- 
tion, is more a scare crow in the mind of those who 


.take counsel of their fears. An awakened public senti- 


ment for Bible reading in the public schools would make 
contemptuous mockery impossible in any teacher. More- 
over, the Word of God has always been able to take 
care of itself, even to withstand and overcome mockery. 
The explanation of its majestic power is that God gave 


it, and God is in it. Let the mocker test it. The Book 


challenges him. Such light minded teachers may be 
found in exceptional instances whose conscience and 
religion are in the keeping of a saceredotal priest, who 
would make mockery of reading the Bible before her 
pupils; but their numbers are few and rapidly diminish- 
ing. The Bible wins all its victories in the face of op- 
position, and has earned the enconium, “the Book of 
the people.” 


(3) VIEWED BY SOME AS AN INVASION OF THE SUNDAY 
ScHOoOL FIELD 


Among objectors there are those who contend that 
the well organized Sunday School Institution affords all 
the field for the Bible that is necessary to the moral 
training of young people. This view finds expression 
in the inquiry, “Why the Bible in the public schools, since 
we have the Sunday School? Why both these agencies 
levying tribute upon the Book to function to the same 


46 Objections to Bible Considered 


end in the sphere of ycuth?”’ But in truth the end is 
not the same; nor the methods, nor the message, although 
the sphere of youth is the field. 

In these two institutions, among the greatest of 
modern times, each provides instruction and training in 
its exclusive field, and for distinctly different purposes. 
The State school is a creation of the State, and wholly 
under State supervision. The other, the Sunday School, 
is a religious organization, under the control of a reli- 
gious body. These two institutions differ in their pur- 
pose, in methods and in administration. The Sunday 
School operates one day in the week, under teachers 
and directors who render a voluntary service as a labor 
of love; the other, the public school, five days in the 
week, under exclusive state control, having paid teachers 


and chosen under standards for good character and for | 


efficiency as teachers of a prescribed curriculum. The 
one has the purpose of evangelizing the pupil to a spirit- 
ual life by the means of the spiritual message of the 
Book, and for the development of that new life after 
the Bible ideals and counsels; the other a prescribed 
course of moral instruction that has the purpose of 
training and developing the moral character for an in- 
telligent and loyal citizenship. The one provides for 
the Bible to function in both the moral and the spiritual 
spheres; the other such moral and intellectual training 
as an intelligent high class citizenship demands. In 
these two great institutions and agencies thus function- 
ing in separate fields, each finds the Bible indispensable, 
yet neither one can fulfill the mission of the other. Hence 
in the light of these distinctive ends this specious objec- 
tion of the public schools invading the Sunday field, 
because of the simple reading of the Bible daily to the 
pupils, is without merit. 


. 


Objections to Bible Considered 47 








The State having taken over the business of primary 
education, and having the distinct end of good citizen- 
ship, is justified in maintaining compulsory public school 
education. The State not only should not suffer rivalry in 
the specific school training for citizenship, but she must 
not and cannot shift any part of the burden upon other 
institutions over which she has no control. 

In a defective moral education in the public schools 
the State is confronted with the complaint of committing 
an irreparable injury to the child, in giving the child 
an abnormal training. The whole course of public school 
education lays the emphasis tipon intellectual training 
rather than upon moral training. And yet every duty 
and every relationship as future citizens will require a 
moral character that may be developed only by specific 
moral training throughout the education of youth. After 
the educational period has passed this defect becomes 
irreparable. The clay has passed its plastic stage, and 
may not be made over after its setting. And in adher- 
ing to a superficial moral training in her schools, the 
State invites any calamity that may arise from an im- 
paired citizenship. 

The normal education of youth embraces both the 
moral+and the intellectual natures, as a umit and as 
inseparable; the one is as necessary to the other as the 
cement is to the brick in the building of a house. In 
the education of youth the State must train the whole 
child in its inseparable moral and intellectual organism. 
‘The child takes all of his nature to school; and in pre- 
empting the right to train him the State must educate 
the whole boy, as she will, by and by have need of 
him in a citizenship that demands the highest character 
of moral intelligence. 


Arya N98 Objections to Bible Considered 


Moreover, the question of the State “sidestepping” 
the moral education of her youth to the Sunday Schools 
presents an impracticable proposition in the fact that 
more than half the public school enrollment does not 
attend the Sunday Schools at all. In this situation of the 
dearth of moral teaching in the State schools, and the 
moral destitution that prevails among half the school 
population, there is presented one of the menacing prob- 
lems of the nation. 

Attention is here directed to.a statement of facts 
given out by a Sunday School Convention, lately held in 
Kansas City :—‘‘Ninteen out of every twenty-five Jewish 
children, three out of every four Catholic children, two 
out of every three Protestant children under twenty- 
five years of age receive no formal religious instruction. 
Or taking the country as a whole, seven out every ten 
children and youth of the United States are not being 
touched in any way by the educational program of any 
church. This calls up a vital questionn—how long may 
a nation endure, seven out of ten of whose children and 
youth receive no systematic instruction in the religious 
and moral sanctions upon which its democratic institu- 
tions rest?” The moral instruction of these, (seven of 
the ten), must come solely from the public schools, or 
they must grow up to enter upon life handicapped for 
high attainment, and a depreciated asset to the State. 
In view of this prevailing situation the State must accept 
the care of the moral training of this vast army of youth 
the same as if there were no such institution as the 
Sunday School. The moral status of any people is in 
jeopardy when more than fifty percent of the rising 
generation are deprived of the essential elements for 
good citizenship in their school training. The question 
arises, how long may a nation endure with fifty percent 


Obzections to Bible Considered 49 


of its citizenry destitute of the moral fitness for public 
service? The threatened evils and calamities confront- 
ing us may be averted only by such training of our youth 
as will fortify the people to meet and overcome such 
dangers. | 

But the real difficulty of public school instruction 
without the Bible, lies deeper than the surface compari- 
sons made of the Sunday School with the public school. 
The judgments formed from such comparisons, that 
moral instruction belongs exclusively to Sunday Schools 
and other religious organizations are unsound, and must 
yield to facts as found in existing conditions. The law 
fixed in the human constitution cannot be annulled by 
conditions and governmental constitutions. The natural 
law has established it that moral and intellectual culture 
cannot be permanently divorced without doing violence 
to the child and youth. The State must educate the 
whole child, or should not undertake its education. The 
sound principle lies in the bed rock truth that the normal 
education of youth embraces simultaneously the moral 
and the intellectual faculties. The public school is there- 
fore under necessity to render that full and symmetrical 
training of both the moral and the intellectual faculties, 
which in the broad sense constitutes education. And 
since their inter-relation so as to compose a unit in 
organism, it is a distortion to educate the intellectual 
faculties and neglect those faculties that express the 
moral nature. Let us again be reminded that the lad in 
the school room has not left his moral nature at home. 
The whole boy is there, and with no part of his being 
more sensitive to influences, good or evil, than his moral 
faculties. 


50 Objections to Bible Considered 


(4) OBJECTION AS BASED ON THE CONSTITUTION 


The objections to the Bible in State education that 
rise above those of a specious character, and that furnish 
the weight of opposition, are based upon the apparent 
legal barriers. Many objectors conscientiously believe 
that it is a violation of our covenant law to read the 
Bible, or quote passages from it in a public school. The 
more intelligent and more conservative element of oppo- 
sition takes the position that if it be not a violation of 
law, it is an approach towards the union of Church and 
State. About every phase of that many sided question 
has had consideration in another HRS Sie Bible in 
the hands of the State,’ and to those page’ the reader is 
directed. But at this juncture it is sufficient to state that 
no United States Supreme Court decision adverse to the 
Bible in the public schools has ever been rendered. The 
nearest approach to a vital decision is the memorable 
deliverance from that body, rendered by Justice Brewer, 
in which the learned jurist confirms the contention that 
ours is a Christian nation, whose common law is the 
moral code of the Bible; that all our ethical laws are 
based upon the Mosaic statutes and the Divine moral 
law. ; 

Congress did provide by a constitutional amendment 
that no religious establishment shall be set up by a law; 
and also that no legislation shall prohibit the free exer- 
cise of religion. The notion that this law forbids the 
State to recognize and reverence the Almighty God in 
the school room, or in any other department of the gov- 
ernment, is not supported by any just interpretation of 
this Amendment. This constitutional barrier is against 
the setting up of a state religion. )It distinctly forbids 
a law-supported religion or church; but the Constitution 


Objections to Bible Considered 51 





does not forbid the Bible to the State, nor the use of the 
Bible by the State. In no sense are the Church and the 
Bible synonymous. The Church is an establishment, an 
institution, as the State is. The Bible is God’s Revela- 
tion to mankind, embracing the individual man and the 
several institutions of God’s ordaining, such as_ the 
family,.the State and the Church. Upon this ground 
the State has a clear right to the Bible, within the State’s 
sphere, as the Church and the family have in their 
spheres. She is exercising that right when she sets up 
the authority, and makes use of the Bible, whether in 
the court room or in the school room. Applying this 
right and principle to the individual it is conceded that 
every one has the unassailable right to read the Bible 
for himself; and yet the State virtually deprives the in- 
dividual of that right and privilege when she takes 
charge of his primary education, and in defining his 
course of instruction, has assumed to deny to him a God- 
given right to the instructions of the Divine Counsellor. 
But this indefensible wrong is done to a whole generation 
of youth when the State shuts the Bible out of her school 
rooms. Ah, what a travesty upon America’s twentieth 
century statesmanship, that we spend a thousand millions 
of doliars a year to educate boys and girls, young men 
and young women, and deny them a Bible in their educa- 
tional program; yet if one is sent to prison for violating 
a law which he had never been taught was a crime, the 
State then gives him a Bible to read. But this priceless 
treasure is not to be placed in his hands unless he he- 
comes the State’s prisoner. If this were not true it 
would be unthinkable. 
The State being a moral institution, she is capable 
of a moral action; and is so held by the Book. And 


52 Objections te Bible Considered 


since she is accountable to God for a righteous govern- 
ment, she must prepare her school children for a right- 
eous support of her laws and government. This she 
neglects when moral training for citizenship is neglected. 
The perpetuation of our nation and government demands 
that we inculcate the moral teachings of the Bible in the 
public schools; and there is no other agency that can so 
efficiently perform this duty to the whole generation of 
our youth as that of the nation’s public schools. 





4 
ai 


. a Ae be ha hs ‘ve Oh Wet ao 
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te ae 4 i Nees te Rhine itt Ae Pig 12 ff) 
BinS) a ral ary v faa a ven eet Me ee at y 
7 f 4 iii 


. eae el ay Bec arih WOR oy : t ray ee ; 
ri pitien ve Pg nats os jie ante OY ARR RRR ott 


teen AF Shae SHR eM VEER AY Set ade? SY 






















ie cs Yd y f " Ma, ' : 
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a + ide TaN ANGLAIS Aa le al hens At oot Ahi 
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be at er a ped ¥ P f 
.. ae. Sie e's ey weber Le hace Rt Bo Swe sey! ; 8 
aad eee Cee Meet eee Be wees Glee Fp eA Y eee eS, Yee 
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aa " . : f i. " he Albee. Eee tet 





ae LAC eR ta Ce Sis Bi havi BP Feria 





A ote * fade il ee hi atte a eh Aye a a \ ye fo regen ie wd 
alae Me Wns tet: it ‘ apr Py Fan on. ea ths el 
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“2 re? ver. Py det Date as ye 7 . ‘ \g ie eins eb 
; ah 2 + rye - Sane h y ce ee "ae oy on " Lge et, OY 
Piaget jhe ae ae ‘ ; os pas f Ay oe rv) ae} ; 

a or as gos ‘ he ? ef se ‘ at vie ps vee We ' ar 





+4 Aa Needs 
eh ese os asst Saie 





Also tn the third year of his retan Irhosaphat 
sent to his princes to teach in the ctttes of | 
Judah, and with them he sent GDeuttes. And 
they taught tn Judah and han the book of the 
lau of the Gord with them ann went about 
throughout all the ctties of Judah and taught 
the people. 
Second Chronicles 17:7-9 


— +9 Bali +> — 


As their gods were so their laws were 

Chor the strony could raue and steal, 

So through many a peaceful inlet 

Core the Norseman’s eager keel. 

But anew law came when Christ came, 

Ana not blameless as before, 

Can we pay to him our lip tithes, 

And gtue our lives and faith to Chor. 
—Luwell 


— + CAND «» — 


Co know the laws of God in nature and 
revelation and then to fashton the affections 
/ and the will into harmony with these laws,— 


this ts enuratton. 
—Syluester FH. Scovel 


CHAPTER IV 


tiie BIBLE..LIN) RHE AHANDS)OR) THEASTATE 


(1) THE BIBLE AND THE STATE CONTRASTED WITH THE 
CHURCH AND STATE 


Thus stated, attention is at once directed to the real 
issue. The question of “the Church and State” is not re- 
motely involved in the State’s use of the Bible in the cur- 
ricula of the public schools. The State would use the 
Bible in the public schools for its educational value, for 
its authentic history of creation, for the primitive history 
of mankind, for the revelation of the hand of God in 
the government of nations, as the Supreme Ruler; and 
above all, for the moral counsels of the Book direct from 
God the Author, and suited to every life. The educa- 
tional value of the Bible along these lines makes it indis- 
pensable. The Church uses the Bible for the high pur- 
poses of spiritual worship, for the preaching of the good 
news of Jesus Christ’s salvation to the ends of the earth, 
for the making of disciples to the Saviour, and for the 
_ training of such disciples after the manner of life ap- 
pointed by Him. The Church has her commission from 
her risen Lord, and that mission confines her to evan- 
gelize, make disciples and teach them obedience to all 
things He has commanded them. The State is concerned 
chiefly about the ethical message of the Bible, and not 
at all about the making of spiritual converts. 

Each of these two Divinely appointed institutions 
has a distinct mission; the Church has a new creation 
and the appointed new life; the State for man as he is, 


56 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


and for this life in the duties of citizenship. And the 
Bible bears its counsels to both institutions, to all men, 
good and bad. So long as the State does not invade the 
realm of spiritual duties by usurping the churchly func- 
tion of preaching the Gospel message of Jesus Christ, it 
is a false cry to raise the objection of “State religion” 
over the simple reading of the Bible in the public schools. 

Since the State may and must teach morals, she 
has the unchallenged right to fix the course of study, 
and select the text books; and there is no ground for 
opposing this right so long as the State, free of Church 
domination or Church alliance, renders the teaching. 
The right of the State to decide what may not be taught 
is beyond question. Acting on the same principle she 
may determine what shall be taught; and there is no 
lawful authority under heaven to deny the State the use 
of the Bible in any department of her government in- 


cluding the educational. \ 


| 
THE ORIGIN OF STATE/ EDUCATION YET OuR GUIDE 


The historian Motley, informs us “that the common 
school system was derived from Geneva, the work of 
John Calvin; was carried by John Knox into Scotland, 
and also became the property of the English speaking 
nations.” He might have added that it was taken from 
Geneva also, and carried into Holland and Sweden, and 
in all countries where it was planted the common or pub- 
lic school has flourished. The State of Connecticut, 
under the lead of Hooker, has the honor of first secur- 
ing free schools supported by the government. The 
glory of our colonial system was that of the free public 
school. Since the seventeenth century public education 
has had a gradual development; and from the beginning 
special emphasis was given to moral instruction direct 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 57 


from the Bible, with no deviation until the latter half of 
the nineteenth century, when public education, under the 
increasing influence of Romanism, has felt the policy 
of excluding the Bible from the schools in many of the 
larger cities of their strongholds. And in several States 
having a Catholic foreign population in preponderance, 
the Bible has been outlawed from their public schools. 
It is to be noted that the power of the Roman Papacy 
has in the main been the dominating influence in those 
cities and States where the Bible has no place in the 
public schools. On the other hand, it is just as note- 
worthy that where Rome does not dominate, the Bible 
very generally has a place in the schools. 

But the organized opposition which the Roman hier- 
archy presents is powerfully abetted by an element 
among the evangelical Christian bodies which is also 
contending for the exclusion of the Bible from the State 
schools. This respectable class, without intending it, are 
serving the cause of that politico-religious hierarchy, and 
although their motives widely differ, the success of their 
common aim will be adjudged as Rome’s notable and 
most significant achievement since the Reformation, and 
the printed Bible among the masses. 

It is noteworthy that not one of the great Protestant 
denominations has gone on record as opposing the Bible 
in the State schools. In the light of a better understand- 
ing of the place of moral teaching in child education and 
the relation of the Bible to all moral truth, there is not 
the remotest probability that any of these religious bodies 
will ever make common cause with the Roman Catholic 
Church against the Bible in the public schools of Protes- 
tant America. 


58 The Bible in the Hands of the State 





THE DELUDED OPPOSITION 


But there are misguided opposers to be found in 
every great religious body. Men of culture and piety who 
jealously love the Bible, unwittingly assume a watchcare 
and custody of the Book, as if they had a Divine com- 
mission to safeguard it from the hands of the profane. 
Their attitude of opposition to the Bible for everybody 
and everywhere, unintentionally reveals the fetish delu- 
sion of the dark ages, that the Bible must be cloistered 
within the Church. They seem indifferent if the effect 
of their attitude tends to withhold from many millions 
of our youth the only Bible counsel available to all those 
who are deprived of moral and religious influences in 
the homes and in the churches. Apparently indifferent 
to this increasing class of benighted childhood, and seem- 
ingly unaware that “the ship of State” is floundering on 
tempestuous seas, they so magnify the “Church and 
State” spectre that the problem of education involving 
America’s destiny seem to them of no concern. In shun- 
ning the rock “Scylla”’ they see no “Charybdis.” Amzdst 
the Diana cry of “Church and State,” they heed not the 
mute appeal of the millions of our youth growing up in 
an environment devoid of every wholesome moral influ- 
ence. They seem not to consider that this morally sub- 
merged class will soon through the privilege of the elec- 
tive franchise, have a determining voice in the affairs 
of government; that the character of any free people is 
reflected in their government and laws. 


OPpposITION NON-CONSTRUCTIVE 


So far we have had only opposition of a negative 
nature to the Bible in the State schools; opposition that 
proposes nothing in substitution. It should be remem- 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 59 


bered that any established policy holds until some op- 
posing policy wins the approval and support of the 
people. In this conflict the opposition is without a con- 
structive policy; just opposed to the Bible in the public 
schools, but offering nothing in the place of the Buble 
for effective moral counsel. When a worth while substi- 
tute for that Book has been found and proposed, that will 
be the time for considering the elimination of the Bible 
in the moral education of our youth. The attitude of 
this anti-Bible class may be reduced to the stereotyped 
expression, “We object; we are opposed to it; it’s dan- 
gerous, and opens the way to State religion.” It is in- 
deed painful to have to make the declaration that this 
obstructionary course of negative opposition to the Bible 
in the State schools is more responsible for the defec- 
tive moral status of many of the schools than any other 
force. A Bible-less school is ultimately destined to be- 
come an un-moral school. Those setting up this manner 
of opposition seem to regard the Bible as the special and 
sacred property of the Church; that the Bible and the 
Church are inseparable. They seem unable to grasp the 
fact that in the moral message of the Bible God speaks 
to mankind. This being true, it is conclusive that to 
shut the Bible out of any sphere of human life is to shut 
God out of that sphere. 


OPPOSITION INCONSISTENT 


The inconsistency of opposing Bible reading in the 
schools is seen when opponents consent for the State to 
use the Book in other departments of administration 
while they object to the State using it in the schools. 
The Bible without objection is allowed a place in the 
council chambers, in courts, in eleemosynary institu- 
tions, in prisons, and in every other department of pub- 


60 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


lic service. It is folly then, and for reasons purely 
specious to deny the Book a place in the finest of all 
the fields for its functioning, that of the moral training 
of the rising generation in the school room. If the legis- 
lator may sit at the feet of Moses, why may not the 
potential legislator in the school room sit there? Almost 
invariably the objections set up are of the nature of a 
specious plea, based upon the details and difficulties in- 
cident to the inauguration of a new and constructive 
policy, or to the raising of the false issue of the State’s 
teaching religion, more generally to this latter objection. 
The contender for State education without the use of 
the Bible chooses an indefensible position. He virtually 
approves The Bible Everywhere, and for Everybody but 
the Child in the School Room. But the masses are com- 
ing to understand that the right of the State to give 
the Bible a place in one department of her administra- 
tion, carries the right to give the Book a place in every 
other department. And they are writing their judgment 
in statutory laws, making mandatory the daily reading 
of selections of the Scriptures in every State school. 


THE HicH AUTHORITY OF THE STATE 


It is to be remembered that the State is a Divinely 
ordained institution, held responsible to God for a right- 
eous rule. Under such a relation the State has the right 
to the Divine counsels for functioning after the will of 
God. Hence objection to the State’s using the Bible 
must come alone from God through His Word; and it 
does not gainsay, but sanctions the ruler’s and the law 
maker’s right to sit at the feet of Moses and Moses’ 
Law Giver. Suppose the Church as an institution should 
forbid this (it does not), the State being in no wise 
subject to the authority of the Church, and therefore, 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 61 


not responsible to that power, may justly ignore such a 
demand. 

The moral instruction of the nation’s youth is an 
absolute necessity for preserving and transmitting her 
ideals and institutions. To that end alone the State — 
under God, is justified in the use of the Bible in every 
department of administration, most especially in that of 
education, when foundations of moral character must 
be laid in the hearts and minds of youth as a basis for 
the duties and responsibilities of citizenship. The youth 
of the nation in the school room, under the moral tutel- 
age of the Author of moral truth, gives assurance of 
that nation’s stability and prosperity beyond any other 
provision that can be made. Thus, from this view of 
the State’s using the Bible free from alliance with any 
religious body, there appears no indication of “Church 
and State.’ Instead we see only the Bible and the State. 
And hence in this understanding of the scope of the 
Divine counsels, and the relation of the State to the 
Supreme Ruler, we may clearly apprehend that the State 
has a full right to employ the Bible for the moral 1n- 
struction of her future citizenship as the Church has 
the right and duty to bear its spiritual message of eternal 
salvation to a world in spiritual darkness. Among “the 
things. that belong to Caesar,’ beyond dispute, is the 
moral character of her future citizenship. She cannot 
commit that trust to another, even if she would. 


THE PURPOSE OF STATE EDUCATION 
It is well understood that the State school has been 
developed under the sole idea of training the rising gen- 
eration for the duties and responsibilities of citizenship ; 
this, and nothing else. The State makes no effort to 
save souls; nor in any sense to usurp the office of preach- 


62 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


ing and teaching the things that pertain to the doctrines 
and ceremonial forms of the Christian religion. While 
the State is a beneficiary in the fullest measure of 
Gospel evangelism and other Church activities, she is 
not directly concerned about the destiny of the pupils 
for another world. Neither is the State in the educa- 
tion of the child, conferring a charity or paying a debt. 
She is undertaking to improve and stabilize social order, 
and to safeguard the future of the commonwealth. The 
whole scheme of public education is based upon the idea 
of rendering the necessary moral and intellectual train- 
ing to her citizens while minors, so that they may enter 
later upon their full duties as citizens. Hence the con- 
cern of the State is a suitable and efficient training for 
intelligence and moral character, the school being her 
sole means to that end. Upon these bed rock founda- 
tions—the moral and the intellectual,—democratic gov- 
ernments are secure, and may flourish. Deprived of 
either, they can not endure. These schools are the 
character making institutions for our youth; and in the 
scale of values, they rank in the class with judicial 
courts, legislative councils and armies of defense. Courts 
and legislatures may be made over, if they fail, but the 
man, once a boy, cannot be made over by any process 
of school training. 


THE STATE’S Ricut to EpucaTte INcLupEs HER RiGuHTs 
IN THE CHILD 

In full appreciation of the training period for the 
tasks and duties of citizenship awaiting the rising gen- 
eration, the State lays a conscripting hand upon her 
youth for that preparation in the school room that will 
best fit them for these varied duties. In view of the 
tasks and responsibilities imposed upon a free people 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 63 


under a democratic government, the conclusion is un- 
avoidable that the program of State education must 
embrace a continuous discipline of both moral and in- 
tellectual faculties, because morality and intelligence are 
supremely essential to the performance of every duty 
of citizenship. When one’s intellect only is trained, the 
liability is that he will become a cultured criminal; and 
when one’s moral nature only is trained there is a ten- 
dency for him to approach blind fanaticism. In either 
case there is a distorted character,—an educated villain 
or a moral fanatic. .Education is incomplete and per- 
verted without the training of both the moral and the 
intellectual faculties, as is tniversally conceded. In 
view of the vast interests of the present and the future, 
the purpose and program of education are amply justi- 
hed? “America’s system. of public education is one of 
the noblest achievements of our civilization; and the 
public schools are the most efficient agency for preserv- 
ing that civilization. 


THE MEANS SUITED TO THE END 


The State, in having the definite purpose of her own 
welfare in the education of her youth, is justified in 
pursuing the course of instruction that will yield the 
necessary quality of citizenship. Hence, whatever goes 
into the curricula must serve that purpose; and that 
which is indispensable in producing it must not be onut- 
ted. The highest quality of citizenship, of course, 1s 
moral character, made conformable to the moral law. 
But character, moral or intellectual, is not an endow- 
ment implanted in the human constitution, but the prod- 
uct of training, (education). Therefore, the State must. 
of necessity provide moral and intellectual training in 
her schools. 


64 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


And since the State has the unchallenged right to 
provide moral instruction for those in her schools, it 
necessarily follows that she may in her own judgment 
adopt the system, the course of study and the text book 
authorities for such instruction. In this situation the 
State has the incontestable right to adhere to the Divine 
system of morals as the authoritative standard for every 
school. In such a position the State may give moral 
teaching direct from the original source, or she may 
choose such text books as are based upon God’s moral 
commandments. In other words, she may teach morals 
from the Bible, or from works on moral science based 
upon the Bible. And so long as the State uses the Bible 
for its moral instruction, and does not delegate such 
service to a religious body, opposition is without grounds. 
In such opposition argument is either specious, or fails 
of the point at issue, by raising the religious question, 
which is not involved. Hence, in view of the purpose 
of State education, the logical conclusion is inevitable 
that, for the maintenance of her ideals and the safe- 
guarding of her noble attainments in moral civics, the 
use of the Bible in her schools is absolutely justifiable. 


II. Tue BIBLE PRESENTS A DiIsTINcT MORAL MESSAGE 


And that moral message concerns all men, because 
it is spoken to all men. When this view is lifted above 
the prevailing prejudices it becomes clear enough that 
the Bible used in the schools for inculcating sound 
morals, does not involve the State in teaching religion. 
The whole moral system, including the statutes and pre- 
cepts, is the common property of mankind. And as there 
is but one universally recognized moral code, there is 
but one Bible, and upon that Mighty Book, America has 
built the finest civilization known to man. That Book 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 65 


was given a place in the corner stone of our government. 
It furnished the wisdom and the inspiration for our con- 
stitution. Its ethical principles permeate our laws as 
salt in the food we eat. Its moral sentiments pervade 
society and all literature. It has given cast and direc- 
tion to our thinking. For two hundred years it has 
dominated our schools, and given character to our na- 
tional life. 


THERE 18 BuT ONE BIBLE; No PLACE For ANOTHER 


In these degenerate days, when every good thing is 
counterfeited, this priceless heritage is challenged by 
miserable caricatures of the Bible in those grossest reli- 
gious frauds of the ages: The Book of Mormon, 
and the silly nothings of Mary Eddy. The recog- 
nition given these cheap imitations of Divine Revela- 
tion, even though limited, is a reflection upon the in- 
telligence of the times. And yet they are covertly cham- 
pioned as worthy of a place among men and along with 
God’s Bible, the time tested Book of forty centuries. 
Some go so far as to contend that the old true and tried 
Bible, bearing its credentials from God the Author, is 
not any more to be given its place in the school room, 
because the rights of some supposed Mormons, or some 
group of Christian Science sisters would be violated. 
Of course, if the Bible were used for the propagation 
of spiritual religion in tax supported schools, opposition 
should and would prevail. The Divine moral code is 
written into our laws and statutes, thus making God’s 
moral law the law of the land. If Joseph Smith’s so 
called revelation, or Mary Eddy’s mental hallucinations 
contain the remotest suggestion of any additional moral 
law, or even a worthy contribution to moral truth given 
from Sinai, the whole world is ignorant of it. When 


66 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


that is shown the people will then consider their educa- 
tional value, in comparison with Heaven’s Book of Moral 
Truth. 


THE BIBLE FUNCTIONS IN Two SPHERES—THE MORAL 
AND THE SPIRITUAL 


There are many among enlightened Christian people 
who balk at this declaration. But all Bible history sup- 
ports the statement. Mr. Bryan so understood the Scrip- 
tures, and said, “The morals and literature of the Bible 
have a value entirely distinct from the religious inter- 
pretation placed upon the Bible.” In the better under- 
standing of its manifold ministry, we are bound to con- 
cede that the Bible functions in one sphere without at 
the same time functioning in every other. In one utter- 
ance we have a statement of history, with its outstand- 
ing moral lessons; in another wisdom expressed in a 
proverb; in others moral truth in commands; and trans- 
cending all these, it brings the message of light and life 
to the soul in darkness and ruin. It reveals the deep 
things of Christ, the Son of God, of His Kingdom and 
Kingdom law, of His matchless life, the most beautiful 
in all the world, of His final triumph over evil and all 
evil forces, with the principles governing the destiny of 
all men in the world to come. These and their kindred 
teachings are lodged in His Kingdom, and have been 
committed specially to His Church for the making of 
disciples to Him and His Kingdom. 

Since it is most important to understand the varied 
ministry of the Bible to man, let us make other citations: 
for instance, in one utterance the Book deals with the 
“natural man” (man in his natural state), and in an- 
other, with the “spiritual man” (the new creation) ; and 
neither of these commands is inclusive. They are not 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 67 


interchangeable. Again, “Thou shalt not steal’ may re- 
strain the thief from the overt act, yet leaving him 
estopped from that transgression he has not thereby 
been led to a spiritual action of seeking the Divine favor 
of the Saviour Jesus Christ, in compliance with another 
and a distinct utterance from the same Book. God’s 
moral utterances carry primarily the moral essence, and 
are given to all men, believers or unbelievers, and their 
perpetual observance is an obligation upon all moral 
creatures. The moral nature of man, no matter how 
sunken in moral depravity, is in some degree responsive 
to the claims of God’s moral law. This significant fact 
supports the contention that the moral law is God’s mes- 
sage to all men. 

In further exemplification of this quality and 
characteristic of God’s Word, the injunction given by 
the inspired writer, “Let every soul be subject to the 
higher powers” (human government), is a command of 
universal obligation, upon “saint and sinner.’ Yet this 
is not remotely related to another command, “Go ye 
into all the world and preach the Gospel to every 
creature.” The first mentioned command is of universal 
obligation, and reveals a principle in the Divine pur- 
pose of human government, as “ordained of God,’ how- 
ever imperfect be its form and administration. The 
extent and purpose of the other command are not uni- 
versal, but specific and restricted to a distinct class—the 
disciples of Christ in His spiritual kingdom. Now, the 
teacher in the school room, using the Bible to enjoin 
obedience to rulers and to law, by reading that Scrip- 
ture and the context, would forcibly exemplify a proper 
functioning of the Bible in a State school. But if that 
teacher should present the Bible teaching upon confess- 


68 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


ing the Lord Jesus as a personal Saviour, and urge the 
ceremonial badge of baptism, following the confession, 
then there would be a clear case of teaching religion 
in the public school. Hence, we may undertsand that 
a Bible moral command as such carries no mandate 
for the performance of duties in another sphere wholly 
different. This distinction is very clear of things in 
the moral and spiritual realms. The Bible verily speaks 
to them “that are under the law,’ as well as to them that 
“are under grace.” 

The moral precepts of that Book fit every life, and 
they are needful to everyone for the shaping of conduct, 
for forming character and the building of a life. But 
teaching moral truth in the schools or anywhere, apart 
from the Bible and its authority, is only a vain effort 
to teach without the teacher. Eliminate the Divine 
authority for moral teaching, and such teaching sinks to 
the level of conventionalism and advice. The impelling 
“ought” and “ought not” come from God’s speaking tt. 


III. Brste Morats May BE TAUGHT IN STATE SCHOOLS 
WitHouT TEACHING RELIGION 


And since this is true, there is not the shadow of 
excuse for opposition to the Bible in the public schools. 
Those among evangelical Christians who oppose, set up 
the objection that any use of the Bible whatsoever would 
in effect be a teaching of religion. They are confused 
over the erroneous notion that the Bible functions only 
in the sphere of religion. They appear unable to dis- 
tinguish morals from religion. Whilst it is true that 
the religion of the Bible embraces the morals of the 
Bible, yet the converse statement is not true, that morals 
comprise religion; for there is often found a well ordered 
moral life in one who makes no pretension to a Godly 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 69 


religious life. If these things be not true, then the point 
of opposition is gained, and the Bible has no place in a 
secular school, or in any other department of the State. 
And more, the Catholic position of withholding the Book 
from the people is to be conceded. But the Bible re- 
fuses to be confined to pulpits, and restricted to the 
spiritual domain, even though it functions in that sphere 
to the highest conceivable ends. 


THE GHURCH TLAS NO EXCLUSIVE RIGHT TO THE BIBLE 


No nation, no people, no religious body, no cult nor 
class, and not even the Church may lay exclusive claims 
to the Divine Book. Jt is God’s Book to send it where 
He may please, and “it shall prosper in the thing where- 
to I sent it.” It will function in the hands of any, even 
in the mouth of the unbeliever and the scoffer to convict 
and convert such a one, because ‘“‘the Word of God is 
not bound.” The Book is to be read by the wayfarer as 
well as by the disciple, by the child as well as the parents 
‘of the child, and by rulers and all in authority, for its 
wise counsels and its faithful warnings. The Masonic 
Order, and many other fraternal bodies appropriate the 
Book, and use it freely in their rituals without com- 
plaint of their having usurped Church functions, and 
of teaching religion. 

“No one has yet shown that the reading of the moral 
lessons of the Bible as given by Moses, his own master- 
ful deliverances in commandments and statutes, together 
with the impressive lessons from Samuel, from David, 
Elijah and Daniel and other great Bible heroes,—no one 
has yet shown that the historical narratives of these 
noble worthies when read to children in the school room 
can be improved upon for impressing moral truth. The 
strength and the weakness of conduct of those sturdy. 


70 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


characters present to the child concrete moral] truths of 
the highest order for its emulation. Added to the rich 
treasury of Old Testament history are the matchless 
parables of our Lord, and the many expositions of ethics 
as He applied them to right living. A day by day read- 
ing of these Bible selections in the schools would con- 
vince the open minded, and even the honest doubter, 
that such use of the Bible is powerfully efficacious for 
the inculcation of moral truth; and instead of the service 
being a hindrance it becomes a forerunner to Christianity. 


THE IRREPRESSIBLE CONFLICT 


After all that may be presented in affirmative plea, 
there is an implacable opposition to the Bible in the 
public schools. The effort to win over that class of 
unyielding opposers is as vain as the effort to make a 
saint of Satan. The Romanist and the Jew oppose the 
Bible in the schools with a stubborn tenaciousness that 
forbids their unprejudiced consideration of the question 
at issue. 


It is indeed marvelous that the Catholic and the 
Jew, age-long enemies, have united for once, in this 
strenuous opposition to the educational policy of the 
country. It is an unexplained phenomenon of psych- 
ology that a point of agreement between radically differ- 
ing parties can unite them in some other cause. Such 
diverse elements may not contend for the same ultimate 
aims, yet agreement on some vital point brings them 
together. But great moral issues have ever caused the 
Pilates and the Herods to make friends. 


The Bible in the Hands of the State aI 


THE CATHOLIC AND THE JEW YOKE-FELLOWS 
IN THE CONFLICT 

The Roman Catholic and the Jew stand for nothing 
in common that could unite them on a policy of educa- 
tion. Yet in this attitude of opposing the open Bible 
for child training they are one. These strange bed- 
fellows join hands at the school house; the Bible is their 
purposed attack, and the object of their common enmity ; 
but the helpless child becomes their victim. But in the 
absence of a cementing bond this unnatural alliance will 
sooner or later break down. 


In no other great issue during the past thousand 
years have these two diverse religious forces been united. 
It is well known that the Jew has suffered such relent- 
less persecution at the hands of the Roman hierarchy 
as he has not from all other sources combined. His 
plight is yet pitiable where Rome’s sway is unopposed. 
During the two thousand years of exile, as wanderers 
over the globe seeking a haven, the Jews have found no 
country and no government that has bestowed upon them 
such freedom and protection as that which they have 
in Anglo Saxon America. The downfall of this free 
government and its splendid civilization would expose 
the’ Jew to the thraldom of his age-long enemy, the 
Roman hierarchy. In his joining in the move against 
the open Bible in the nation’s school room, he moves to 
destroy his own house, and break down the wall of pro- 
tection that our Bible-formed civilization affords hin. 
But “Ephraim is joined to his idols.” And if the Jew 
persists in thus aiding his arch enemy, and refuses sup- 
port to the institutions protecting him, then we must, 
and we will do the thing despite his opposition. 


72 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


In view of the bloody record of the Roman Catholic 
Church through the centuries, and of their unbroken 
record of withholding God’s Book from the people, even 
from their own following, (burning Bibles instead of 
distributing them among the nations), we are led to con- 
sider their attitude as entirely consistent, and must 
appraise them as the same implacable foe to an open 
Bible for the people. And since it is a cardinal doctrine 
of the papacy that the first allegiance of the Catholic is 
to Rome’s authority, and not to the civil powers; the 
elective franchise determines no issue so far as his vote 
goes. So long as Rome’s authority is first, discussion 
with that class is vain, and a free, independent expres- 
sion by his ballot is impossible. He takes orders from 
the Roman Vatican in the spirit of the bond servant 
to his master. Counter orders or appeals from Wash- 
ington would be disregarded. As a world political sys- 
tem, masquerading in the robe of Christianity, it pre- 
sents the menace of a class en masse, and represent; 
political sentiments foreign to the spirit and genius of 
free Americanism. The Catholic is a subject of two 
governments, hating one and cleaving to the other. 


Tuts IRREPRESSIBLE ISSUE A CHALLENGE 


In this irrepressible conflict between America and 
Rome, in which America’s “crown jewel” is endangered, 
that foreign politico-religious hierarchy may understand, 
once for all, that the advocates of “the Book for all 
men” do not intend to allow the issue of an open and 
free Bible for the moral education of the thirty millions 
of our youth to be determined by a religious body that 
chains the Bible to her altars, and suffers it to speak 
only as she interprets it. In placing the Church above 
the authority of the Bible, it follows that the Church 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 73 





must control the Book; and this is Rome’s monstrous 
contention. This claim of holding supreme authority in 
religion carries the claim of holding the exclusive right 
to interpret to the people the plain words spoken by the 
mouth of God; and that is tantamount to an implication 
that God failed to speak intelligently to the common 
understanding and requires an interpreter. Hence we 
have a vicegerent of the Almighty, mitered and robed 
in the garments of Royalty, in the Roman Vatican, 
“exalting himself above all that is called God,” “showing 
himself that he is God,’ assuming censorship of the 
Word of God. What more can be added to this display 
of Satan’s blasphemies? But°on this Gibraltar we stand: 
The moral message of the Bible comes to mankind 
already interpreted. God Himself gave it in the simplest 
terms of expression. In the full confidence that God 
spake His Word, and does continually speak it to all 
men, we are bound to maintain that the Bible is the 
world’s Moral Teacher, and by Divine purpose must con- 
tinue to function as such. 


RoME’S OPPOSITION RE-ENFORCED 


It is lamentable that Rome’s opposition to the Bible 
in the public schools is strengthened by a respectable 
number from the ranks in the Protestant Churches. In 
the incompatible alignment of this element with this 
inveterate enemy of the open Bible, they find themselves 
opposing the Bible for its direct power and influence 
over the entire school population. While they hold noth- 
ing in common with this politico-religious hierarchy in 
civic ideals and aims, yet if Rome should finally succeed 
in banishing the Bible from the schools, her success will 
have been made possible by this class of intelligent 
citizens; and yet this “Church and State” group are in 


74 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


no wise in sympathy with Rome’s aims and methods. 
They are unwittingly marching under a banner that 
stands for the overthow of our ideals and our system 
of self government. The liberal explanation of this 
attitude is that they confuse the moral properties of the 
Bible with the things that are distinctly spiritual. Since 
moral truth paves the way to spiritual truth they seem 
unable to apprehend that moral truth is fundamental, 
and presents a distinct and complete system. Of course, 
they are not in sympathy with Rome, though they are 
unwittingly acting as her coadjutors in the object 
pursued. 

The final banishment of the Bible from the public 
schools of America would be regarded as Rome’s victory, 
and would be acclaimed her greatest triumph on this 
continent. Without the aid of this allied force, Rome’s 
achievement is impossible. This intelligent but mis- 
guided group have departed from their own ideals and 
standards, and are working hand in hand with the enemy 
of self government and the old time democratic religion 
of the Bible. In this unholy alliance they are losing 
sight of the basic truth that God’s Word speaks to “the 
natural man” as well as to those “who are spiritual ;” 
and that the burden of His message to “the natural man” 
is His Moral Law. 


Gop’s Morat LAw oF UNIVERSAL OBLIGATION 


In the confusion incident to this much controverted 
issue it becomes easy to lose sight of the fundamental 
fact that every moral creature under heaven is made 
subject to the moral law of God; that this obligation is 
as eternal as it is universal. The moral law is embodied 
in the Commandments; it is amplified in statutes and 
precepts; it is illustrated in the lives of the holy men 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 75 


of the Bible, and is finally interpreted and exemplified 
by Jesus Christ, thus presenting the one complete and 
perfect system of morals known to man. The child in 
the home and in the school room is, first of all, entitled 
to know this law. 


The confusion is increased by a needless confound- 
ing of morals with religion. Preachers, theological 
teachers and school men, here and there, are found using 
these terms interchangeably. They seem to hold that 
morals embrace religion, and is religion because religion 
includes morals. This notion if true would forbid the 
inculcation of Bible morals by State schools. But it 
is false. on its face, and false in fact. It is a Bible 
revelation that all men are held under the law of God, 
subject to the law’s demands. This subjection to the 
Divine law makes it necessary that all shall be given the 
moral law, and taught the obligation of obedience, which 
it imposes. 

The great statesman, Daniel Webster, gave expres- 
sion to a vital principle of government when he said, 
“The right to punish crime involves the duty of teach- 
ing morals.” The Bible sets forth this principle in all 
its great utterances, for no threat of punishment can 
be found in it without a corresponding moral lesson 
which, if learned, would safeguard the individual from 
punishment as an offender. In order that the State 
which punishes may teach morals that will prevent the 
necessity for punishment, it must have a text book on 
morals that will meet every need of the citizen. The 
Bible alone is such a Book. It includes the whole world, 
“for what things the law saith, it saith to them that are 
under the law; that every mouth may be stopped, and 
all the world may become guilty before God.” 


76 The Bible in the Hands of the State 





Since the State has the right to enact laws that 
carry punishment; and since she has a right to teach 
her youth. those laws, surely she has a right to teach 
those moral lessons that will enable her citizens to keep 
her laws, and thus avoid punishment. There are certain 
definite and universal moral laws, recognized by 
mankind. These laws have been incorporated in the 
Bible. America has drawn her ideals from this Book 
and has builded her great institutions upon its precepts. 
She has recognized the universal obligation imposed 
upon man by the moral laws of God, and has meted 
out her punishments to wrong doers largely according 
to the teachings of the Bible. Therefore, since knowl- 
edge of the law is a necessary agent for the enforcement 
of the law; and since obedience to civil law is a moral 
action demanded by the moral law, it follows that a 
training of the youth of the land in the Divine basis 
of all moral law is not only justifiable, but absolutely 
necessary. 


MaAn’s Morac CONSTITUTION 


In further consideration of morals and religion, let 
us view the question of Bible morals from the stand- 
point of man’s nature. In his creation man was con- 
stituted with a moral nature, having moral faculties en- 
tirely distinct from those that are intellectual. The 
moral nature of man has been marred by moral trans- 
gression, yet his moral nature is not extinct. It is to 
be observed that in his natural state man is not only 
amenable to every moral precept of God’s teachings, 
but despite his moral blemish, he is yet responsive to 
God’s moral laws; that is, he has a moral sensibility of 
right, justice, honesty, truth, and ofthe obligation to 


The Bible in the Hands of the State a7 


obey God as set forth in the moral counsels of the 
Bible. 

It is understood that it was in man’s moral nature 
he was “created in the image of God.” In his creation 
man was given a spiritual nature, as well as a moral 
and intellectual nature. It was in the spiritual quality 
of his being that he died under the threatened curse, 
“in the day thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” 
He did not in that act of disobedience die, physically, 
morally or intellectually. Hence, in no other sense could 
the progenitor of the race have died than in his spiritual 
fature, But this spiritually dead race 1s yet alive’in 
the moral nature, and responsive to God’s moral re- 
quirements. In that fallen state, having only a moral 
and intellectual nature, God held man accountable under 
His moral government, and gave him the moral law 
to bind him to His government. Man’s first response 
was on the occasion of the giving of the law, at Sinai. 
That response revealed a moral, but not a spiritual 
nature. “All that the Lord hath spoken we will do,” 
was the answer of the multitudes numbering many hun- 
dred thousands of every character, good and bad. 


Moreover, the Bible declares that all men are held 
accountable under God’s law, whether the law be spoken 
to them or written in their hearts. The Divine moral 
law is understood to be in a sense an expression of 
God’s holy moral nature. It is the moral law of the 
universe, and has been set forth in a code for the tute- 
lage of mankind. Man though dead in his original 
spiritual nature, is yet constituted to receive the Divine 
moral counsels; and though spiritually dead, he is still 
a moral creature. In this state of man’s impaired con- 
stitution the conviction is irresistible that education. is 


78 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


radically defective without the instruction of man’s 
moral faculties in God’s moral teachings. The State 
is and ought to be concerned about the moral char- 
acter of her citizenry. The destiny of every people, 
first of all, rests in the morals of the masses. Thus 
confronting a situation always potentially perilous, the 
State addresses herself to the task of character train- 
ing of her youth in the school room. In so doing, and 
admonished by multiplied failures to arrest the increas- 
ing immoral tendencies of youth, she employs the 
supreme character builder as moral instructor. And in 
such use of the Bible in the school room the State is 
but adhering to the nation’s fixed educational program . 
for nearly two hundred years. 


THE Morar EpucaATION OF THE JEWS UNDER THE 
Mosaic DISPENSATION 


In demonstration of the effectual working of His 
moral law as an educational force, God set up His 
framed law over a nation of His own direct creating, 
and He tutored them, using the law as “a school master”’ 
during nearly fifteen hundred years. Under that con- 
tinuous moral training God developed Jacob’s posterity 
from an Egyptian bondage into such high qualities of 
ethical and social virtues that the Jewish nation far 
excelled all other people of their times. That demon- 
stration of Divine moral instruction has been an out- 
standing object lesson to all people of God’s estimate 
of moral education, and the way of accomplishing it. 
The course of instruction gave prominence to moral 
truth in its comprehensive scope, and was so applied 
as to exalt the Divine way of right living as the chief 
purpose of education. It gave moral foundations for 
a life time of building therein. And no master educator 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 70 


of any age has taught to the contrary. Even the pagan 
philosopher, Plato, approached this fundamental prin- 
ciple in education, when he exalted the moral above the 
intellectual, as a first essential for citizenship in a 
republic. 

But God’s Book puts it more forcibly than Plato. 
Moses gave the details of the day by day instruction 
of the Jewish child; hear him: “Thou shalt teach them 
diligently to thy children, and shalt talk of them when 
thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by 
the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou 
risest up. And thou shalt bind them for a sign upon 
thine hand, and they shall be as frontlets between thine 
eyes.” Instead of modern educators accepting this way, 
it is proposed that America’s children be educated 
without the counsels of that Book; without its moral 
foundations. It would prove a vain experiment to im- 
prove upon God’s way. Education without the Bible 
is practically unmoral, and wherever such a policy ob- 
tains it has furnished no proof of its merit. 


THE Morat EDUCATION FOR AMERICA 


America’s splendid civilization has admittedly been 
built up on the moral foundations furnished by the 
Bible. It is as truly a Bible formed nation as was the 
Jewish nation. Every principle of ethical law in our 
government is rooted in the teaching of the Book. The 
moral stamina of the people has been the chief factor 
in our elevation to a foremost place among the great 
nations. Our continued supremacy in the world depends 
more upon the maintenance of high Bible moral stand- 
ards than upon all other forces and influences combined. 
The place held by the Bible in education determines 
today the place of any people in the ranks of nations. 


80 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


It is unthinkable that countries like China, India and 
Turkey could dominate those nations whose civilization 
has been built upon the moral ideals furnished by the 
Bible. The essential quality of moral stamina in the 
sense of refined justice, is too feeble in those peoples 
for them to cope successfully with nations of superior 
moral development. They have groped in moral dark- 
ness, without moral standards from the beginning of 
their national life; and without the light and guidance 
of the Book which has been the builder of nations from 
the beginning, they are destined to remain in their back- 
wardness as object lessons of a Bible-less civilization. 
France has been a hundred years striving to recover the 
once commanding position she held among the powers 
of earth, before shutting the Bible out of her govern- 
ment and her schools. Germany will, for many years to 
come, reap the bitter fruits of the false moral teaching 
of her youth. Neitsche supplanted Moses in Germany’s 
schools; and within fifty years of his God-less, brutal 
teaching, that people, which had shared most freely in 
the fruits of Protestant Reformation, turned from peace- 
ful pursuits to the bloodiest war of all the ages. America 
will adhere to the Bible, and will give the Book the place 
of authority. 


In view of these and other object lessons of history, 
revealing nations either helpless, or adrift on an un- 
charted sea without this Divine Counsellor, the question 
is both timely and pertinent. Shall America’s fine civi- 
lization, made by the Bible, now dispense with the Bible? 
The question answers itself. The spirit dominating 
Anglo-Saxon civilization is a creation of the Divine 
Book. The perpetuation of that civilization demands the 
transmission of those bedrock moral foundations that 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 81 





underlie and undergird our laws and our institutions. And 
above all, the security and stability of democracies rest 
only on sound moral principles pervading the plain 
people. Monarchies may endure longer with little moral 
support from the masses; but for a self-governing people 
to endure, they must have the full moral furnishing 
found in the Divine Book. 


BIBLE MorALs COMMON PROPERTY 


In no spirit of flippancy would the writer deal with 
any phase of these weighty matters; but the ludicrous 
attitude assumed by some of the opposers is provoking 
to the limit. After a beating of the “tom-toms” in a 
ceaseless cry of the “bug-a-boo” of “Church and State,” 
they catch a fresh breath to declare to these profaners 
of sacred things that the Bible is out of place in a pub- 
lic school; that it is the exclusive property of the Church; 
that the Church has the safe keeping of that Book from 
all ungodly hands; that viclence is done in this con- 
scription by the State,—a kind of profaning of the vessels 
of the Lord’s house before a Belshazzar crgy is com- 
mitted. Yes, yes, friend objector; when this illimitable 
treasury of God’s truth is shown to be in your care and 
keeping, or in the exclusive keeping of the Church, then 
your cry of alarm will be heard; but until that is shown 
you will be laughed at as one who takes himself too 
seriously. That class of objectors may yet have to be 
reminded that they are more agitated over shutting the 
Bible out of certain spheres than they show concern 
about sending it abroad in a world of darkness to shed 
its Divine light. 

There may be, and is, found here and there one 
who would make a foolish display of his jealous but 
self appointed guardianship of the Bible, but no religious 


82 The Bible in the Hands of the State 





body known to the writer, save the Roman hierarchy, 
pretends to hold “a corner” on the Bible, especially on 
its moral teachings. In the realm of Bible morals there 
are no exclusive rights. The Jew, the Catholic, the 
evangelical of every name share, and share alike, in this 
legacy. Even the great heathen religions are adopting 
the morals of the Bible. Religious bodies among us may 
differ widely upon doctrines, methods and forms of gov- 
ernment; but they do not divide, upon the moral teach- 
ings of the Bible. In Bible morals the Christian world 
is one. The explanation of this agreement is found in 
the fact that there is not a moral truth revealed, the just 
statement of which is open to a contradictory interpre- 
tation. In its marvelous simplicity it can be and is 
brought even to the apprehension of the child, and for 
the sake of the child. 


BIBLE MorRALS THE COMMON FAITH OF MANKIND 


And since the Divine system of morals is of com- 
mon interest to all the religious bodies, there is no just 
ground for objections to teaching Bible morals in the 
school room. There are not, never were, and never can 
be two or more systems of morals any more than two 
or more multiplication tables. In the matter of morals 
we are all of one faith; and therefore, it may be main- 
tained that the use of the Bible in the public schools, 
teaching what everybody believes—Bible morals,—is in 
no proper sense a teaching of spiritual religion. The 
State in her own interest must teach morals. Even the 
daily administration requires moral truth and its enforce- 
ment. And since moral truth emanates only from this 
Divine Luminary, the State in the use of the Book is 
but having the Author speak His own message. In 
addition to these facts and first principles, we must ac- 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 83 


cept the evident truth, namely, the child is endowed with 
moral faculties eminently fitted to learn moral truth 
from the beginning of its training, and that the moral 
and intellectual faculties must be trained during the 
school period of the child. 


IV. THe RIGHT OF THE STATE TO ENAcT MoraAt Laws 
CARRIES THE RIGHT TO TEACH THE AUTHORITY 
FoR MoraL LAw 


There is no denial of the authority of the State to 
enact laws of a moral and ethical nature. But the right 
to give moral instruction co-extensively with such legis- 
lation is called in question. Reducing the objector’s 
position to a definite statement we have something like 
this expression of it: The State may enact an ethical law, 
but she may not give instructions for the observance of 
such a law. But if this objection be found too sweep- 
ing then shall it be qualified to embrace only such laws 
as are traceable directly to the Divine laws? Strange 
it is that this class of objectors fail to observe that this 
right as a logical sequence is established and pursued 
by the State in every instance of publishing new laws. 
The intent of publication is instruction, even though it 
be called information. And it is but a step further in 
the same direction to take the text of her ethical laws 
into the school room, to enlighten the understanding of 
her youthful citizens in the nature and origin of such 
laws. 

Keeping in mind that the chief purpose of State 
education is to provide for herself a citizenship with 
high moral character, the State will yet face the neces- 
sity, for her own preservation, of commencing at the 
beginning of citizenship to build into the foundations of 
character the moral principles of right and justice, from 


84 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


the original source and authority of such principles. 
Hence, in the right to publish the laws, the State may 
teach her laws, including those ethical laws that are 
based directly upon the Divine moral law. This right 
is asserted by every judge in every court of the land; 
also in the prisons, in the alms houses, in the juvenile 
reform schools, and even in the State’s legislative coun- 
cils, and that without opposition. 


Notwithstanding the right as a principle, and all 
these precedents of other departments of the State in 
using the Bible without restriction, the exception of the 
department of education is insisted upon by these classes 
who oppose the use of the Bible in public schools. These 
inconsistent objectors are thus found consenting to the 
State using the Bible in all other departments of admin- 
istration but the schools. There they draw the line and 
bar the door, “thus far, but no further.” But it must 
be steadfastly insisted that the right to enact moral and 
ethical laws carries the full right to teach moral law in 
its fundamentals, yea, teach any law of the Divine code, 
or the whole Divine code. And since that code is the 
parent law, the State may not only teach her own laws, 
but may trace them to their source and authority. In 
so doing the State does not need to make requisition 
upon the Church. She simply makes way for the Bible 
to speak its own moral message direct to the child. 
Constitutional Barriers are Against the Church, Not the 
Bible. 

The Supreme Court of the United States has never 
delivered a decision that denies the right of any com- 
monwealth public school to read the Bible in its schools. 
Every decision having a bearing on the question rather 
justifies such use of the Bible in the State schools. In 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 85 


Justice Brewer’s memorable decision, rendered in 1893, 
he at great length declared this to be a Christian nation, 
founded on the Bible, and that Christianity is the un- 
written law of the land. Ours being a Christian nation, 
in a national sense, as against a pagan or a Moham- 
medan nation, the Bible is no more sectarian in America 
than is the Koran in Turkey. 


Several state supreme courts have rendered deci- 
sions to the effect that the Bible is not a sectarian Book. 
The decision of the Kentucky Court of Appeals in 
affirming a decision of a lower court, declares that the 
Bible is not a sectarian Book; that reading the Bible in 
the public schools, without note or comment by the 
teacher, is not sectarian; and such use of the Bible does 
not make the school house a house of worship; and 
furthermore any particular edition of the Bible cannot 
be said to be sectarian because any such edition may 
be used by any church. As the courts view it, the Bible 
is not more sectarian in America than the Koran is 
sectarian in Turkey. 

Congress did provide by a constitutional amendment 
that no religious establishment shall be set up by a law; 
and also that no legislation shall prohibit the free exer- 
cise of religion, (Christian or pagan). By the greatest 
strain upon the meaning and purpose of the amendment, 
the reading of the Bible in the school room is viewed 
by some as a violation of this fundamental law. Such 
use of the Bible certainly does not.come under the first 
clause of that amendment, regarding “the establishment 
of religion;” and furthermore it does not involve the 
second clause, “prohibit the free exercise thereof.” 
Those who hold to the constitutional objection begin with 
the wrong premise. They assume that the Church and 


86 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


religion are one and the same. Religion is the system 
or thing proclaimed. The Church is the Divine agency 
for preaching or proclaiming religion. That which is 
proclaimed (religion) and the proclaimer (the Church), 
can never be the same. The State therefore in divorcing 
herself from the Church did not divorce herself from 
religion, nor from the Bible the source and authority of 
morals and religion. Education being a necessary State 
function—training for efficient citizenship—she must use 
the Master Text Book to that end in the school room, 
in the same right that the Church finds its distinct mes- 
sage in the same Divine Treasury of Truth. 

Democracy Not CHALLENGED BY THE CONSTITUTIONAL 

AMENDMENT 


Every article in America’s Constitution either 
directly or by implication recognizes the sovereign will 
of the people as the court of last appeal and decision. 
And the will of the majority when properly expressed 
becomes the will and law of the government. This 
amendment so far as concerns the use of the Bible in 
the public schools, is not to be interpreted in a way that 
would commit the educational program of our country 
into the hands of a minority, because the issue does not 
involve a constitutional question, but a policy of govern- 
ment; and that is to be determined alone by the expressed 
will of the majority. The constitution provides for the 
protection of a minority in their constitutional rights, 
but does not allow for the rule of a minority over a 
majority in the administration of government. Without 
this principle obtaining there could be no stability in a 
democratic government. Hence we may view the fun- 
damental nature of our government as fixed; but the 
methods and policies are not. These things are within 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 87 


the reserved rights of the people; are flexible, and may 
be changed as new conditions may arise. Now in all 
matters of educational policies and school administra- 
tion, majorities and not minorities must govern. 


Understanding that the use of the Bible in the 
schools by the State, and not by the Church does not 
violate the constitutional inhibitions of “Church and 
State,” it must of necessity be a question of State policy, 
to be determined by the will of the people, which may 
find expression either direct by votes or through their 
representatives in the legislative body. Yet this matter 
of ruling the Bible out of the schools is often deter- 
mined by a minority, under the subterfuge that their 
rights are not to be violated by a majority. In such 
case these rights are assumed to be constitutional guar- 
antees, when they are not. Hence, since the issue is 
clearly one of policy, and open to legislative enactment, 
the rule of democracy by the majority must prevail, 
else, what becomes of the rights of the majority? Shall 
the majority yield to the minority, or the minority yield 
to the majority? If a minority shall not submit to the 
will of the majority, then how small a minority shall 
we recognize before reaching the vanishing point, when 
the false premise, with its false position shall be aban- 
doned? 

If forty-nine percent of the people may set aside the 
wishes of 51 percent, then may not one percent success- 
fully oppose a measure, and thereby dominate the 99 
percent? Yes, if the people may be hoodwinked into 
the notion that a constitutional question is involved, as 
in this case, and the people be led to believe that it is © 
a matter of “Church and State” instead of the Bible 
and the State. It is very evident that the Bible issue 


88 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


does not involve a constitutional question, but a policy 
of administration, to be determined by the will of the 
majority, which in this case, is known to be over- 
whelmingly in favor of the moral education of the 
nation’s youth under the counsels of the Bible. This is 
American democracy, the rule of the majority, and there 
is no other. 

But turning again to the Book, and in its clear light, 
it may be learned afresh that the Bible is the charta of 
the Church, and the counsellor to the State. It furnishes 
the Christian ministry with the only message that car- 
ries light to the soul in darkness. Every moral virtue 
is rooted in its teachings; and there is no just ethical 
law, current in society or expressed in statutes that is | 
not to be traced to its source in that Treasury of 
wisdom. Thus, we are led to understand that “the Word 
of God is not bound,’ but under the Divine purpose, 
functions in every sphere open to its ministry. It can no 
more be anchored to the pulpit, as in days of yore. It 
has more tongues and more messages than all the 
preachers of all time have ever voiced. The preacher 
has his office by Divine appointment; but let him not 
think that he is indispensable to the Bible. It does not 
cease to function after furnishing his message. “It 
shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish 
that which I please, and it shall prosper in the things 
whereto I sent it.” 

THE RELATION OF THE CHILD TO THE STATE 

It is a hopeful indication that the matter of public 
morals is now claiming the serious attention of leaders 
in the educational, political and religious circles. The 
very grave situation of child life exposed to immoral 
influences abounding in society, and never before so 


The Bible in the Hands of the State 89 





menacing, compels the most serious consideration. The 
moral welfare of the child is felt to be one of the nation’s 
problems. This is emphasized’ by the many organized 
societies of men and women for child welfare. An addi- 
tional evidence is found in new statutory legislation that 
is intended to provide a better school environment and 


better moral safeguards for our youth. They are ap- 
praised as the nation’s most valued asset, in the pre- 


-paratory stage of childhood, under State training for 


future citizenship. 


The inculcation of public morals necessarily begins 
at the nation’s school house. Here the child is brought 
into new relations with the State, and is taught to share 
in some of the duties and privileges of citizenship. In 
that beginning the State assumes a new and special care 
of her young citizen. In the education of the child the 
State begins with nature’s unspoiled plastic material, to 
form and develop it after her own ideals and purposes. 
Mindful of the one objective of good citizenship, the 
State must faithfully use the brief training period to 
that end, remembering the trite but pertinent maxim, 
“the child of today is the citizen of tomorrow.” The 
State has been slow to learn that the character of the 
rising generation is in her hands, and to be determined 
by the character of its education. The State does not 
yet appreciate the soundness of the claim that every 
quality of high class citizenship, attainable through edu- 
cational processes, is the child’s right. Since the man 
of today is the product of the State’s yesterday train- 
ing in the school room, the responsibility incurred in 
this child conscription ought to be felt as the most grave 
among civic duties. And in the undertaking, the destiny 


90 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


of the child is not more problematical than that of the 
State. 


MoraAL DOWNGRADE TENDENCIES Must BE ARRESTED 


We are apprehending from a grave situation that 
society is suffering an alarming deterioration under the 
influence of lowered moral standards. The perceptible 
downgrade of the masses is traceable to an enfeebled, 
undeveloped moral stamina. This stunted development 
is chargeable chiefly to a neglect of moral training during 
the training period, or to a training under false ideals. 
The unprecedented increase of juvenile crime, and the 
flaunting display of “jungle morals” are to be accounted 
for, either by the neglect of sound moral teaching, or 
by a false moral teaching in the school room. The: 
arrest of this downgrade tendency is not to be found 
in juvenile. reform schools, patching old garments with 
new cloth; not in societies having for their purpose the 
improvement of environment and additional activities 
for child life; nur in the modern school methods of 
moral training by the conventional moral maxims, em- 
phasized in numberless “don’ts,” —don’t do this, and 
don’t do that. All these experiments fail to reach the 
moral nature; and hence they fail to generate a moral 
impulse. But the old neglected Book of God’s moral 
counsels points the parent and the teacher to the way, 
and the only way: “Train up a cihld in the way he 
should go: and when he is old he will not depart from 
rhe ee 


The sweeping from the school room of the pagan- 
istic teachings of Evolution and the many other perni- 
cious doctrines that sanction or wink at moral laxity, 
is but the first step in the needful house cleaning. But 


The Bible in the Hands of the State gI 


to sweep the house of things corrupting, and bring not 
in those active and positive influences that made for 
the moral welfare of the child, is to exemplify afresh 
the parable of the unclean spirit going out of a man, 
and afterwards finding his place unoccupied, swept and 
garnished, it re-enters, to make the last state worse than 
the first. In casting out false teaching from the school 
room, it must not be left empty, to invite some other form 
of false teaching, but let us see to it that the Master 
Educator, the Bible, shall enter in to occupy. The State 
in determining what shall not be taught is but adhering 
to her right under the same principle, when she directs 
what shall be taught. In the words of the late William 
Jennings Bryan, God’s World man,—‘The right of the 
taxpayers to decide what shall be taught can hardly be 
disputed. Some one must decide. The hand that writes 
the pay check rules the school; if not, to whom shall 
the right to decide such important matters be entrusted?” 


The widely prevalent moral stupor explains the un- 
responsiveness of the people to a quickening stimulus. 
The long period of the steady decline of moral training 
in the schools is at last reflected in a generation at ease 
under lowered moral standards. Of logical necessity the 
ratio has been preserved between the school world and 
the world of adults. But under the shock of increasing 
crime eruptions, threatening a collapse of orthodox 
moral standards, the necessity is gradually gripping the 
public mind that God’s moral counsels cannot be rele- 
gated to a corner, or banished from the nation’s school 
rooms, without incurring the consequences in the inevit- 
able Divine judgments to follow upon a State and people 
that ignore His laws of right living. At last, in emerging 
from the cloud land of confusion, incident to the pur- 


g2 The Bible in the Hands of the State 


suing of an ignis fatuus in educational experiments, re- 
sulting only in sickening disappointment, we have learned 
one priceless, fundamental truth,—that education is in- 
complete without moral instruction; and moral instruc- 
tion is incomplete without the Bible. 

Conforming to this vital principle in education, of 
the contemporaneous development of the moral and the 
intellectual faculties, we should return to the former 
custom of having the Bible speak a message daily in 
every public school in the land. This would be no doubt- 
ful experiment, but a return to a tried and approved 
policy of the former better days. 


In the final word, suffer a reminder that the moral 
spirit of our sovereign free people is generated by the 
Bible, and the Bible only. Apart from that source every’ 
moral excellence of the people must continue in decline. 
A nation’s final extinction is preceded by a decadence 
of the moral virtues. Moral virtues are the product of 
moral training. And the school room of the nation 
affords the one field for laying those enduring moral 
foundations in the young that will ensure moral stability, 
and will both shape and safeguard the destiny of our 
beloved country, the most signally favored by Heaven 
of all the earth. 





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— ‘ ‘oc | i . tha a 


’ Syne ia va ae a, DN BA ON bettie ie 
< ie : wh roa PENS, Poke Ny decal bce tA, 


Har as the rain cometh Oown and the snow 
from heaven and returneth not thither, but 
watereth the earth and maketh tt bring forth 
ann bud, that tt may gtue seen to the sower 
ann brean to the eater; so shall my word be 
that goeth forth out of my month, tt shall not 
return unto me unin, but tt shall arcompltsh 
that which fi please ann tt shall prosper tn the 


thing whereunto I have sent tt. 
Isaiah 55-10-11 


— + CHIN #* — 


Che Sptrit breathes upon the word, 
Arn brings the truth to sight; 
Jirecepts and promises atforn 

A sanrtifying light. 

Che Gand that gave it still supplies 
Che gracious light and heat: 

Gis truths upon the nations rise; 
Chey rise, but never set. 


— + BIND» — 


| Education begins with life. Before we are 
aware the foundations of character are laid, 
ann subsequent instruction avails but little to 


reitoue or alter it. 
—Franklin 


CHAPTER V 


THE SUFFICIENCY OF THE BIBLE FOR 
MORAL INSTRUCTION 


The Bible is preeminently a book of morals. The 
way of right living claims more than half of all its 
utterances. Right living lies at the foundation of all 
substantial race progress. Right living is brought to 
light originally in God’s Word. Its bedrock ethical 
principles have never been superseded. Amidst all the 
inventions and discoveries of men, there has not been 
a single discovery of a distinct moral truth. Man’s 
contributions have at best been but a generation of the 
principles found in this moral code, and an application 
of them through rules and laws for moral conduct. In 
a fundamental sense, the Bible reveals all there is of 
moral truth. 

In contrast with modern civilization under Bible 
counsels and ideals, those nations of antiquity, deprived 
of this Treasury of Divine Knowledge, and groping in 
moral darkness, have made no advancement in those 
things that characterize modern civilization. In the 
main, as we find them today, so they were a thousand 
years ago. In the fields of discovery, science, literature, 
moral and social life, the pagan peoples of the world 
are yét walking in the paths of their remote ancestors. 
Their only light is that which is reflected by govern- 
mental and financial relations with the enlightened 
Bible-formed nations. Their backwardness is displayed 
in their family relations, in crude dwelling houses, in 
methods of travel and transportation, in the absence of 


(6 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





public utilities, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and asy- 
lums for the aged and afflicted. And added to this 
wretched state is the absence of incentive to improve 
conditions. That inspiration, working as a mighty 
moral lever, finds original source in the Divine Coun- 
sels, without which people will remain in squalor and 
ignorance, acquiring only a veneer of that civilization 
which bears upon every phase of it the Bible stamp. 
With debased womanhood, and brutalized child life, 
universal characteristics of pagan civilization, they pre- 
sent a contrast with peoples of Bible lands as great as 
if they were an inferior race, and inhabitants of another 
planet. The Bible is set to accomplish the elevation of 
every race, because it begins with God’s counsels for 
right living, the first step in the upward climb. 


THIS SUFFICIENTLY DEMONSTRATED IN THE SCHOOL 
Room 


Since it is conceded that the Bible is sufficient in 
its broad scope for inculcating moral truth generally, 
it is in order that the Book be considered in that light 
in the school room. ‘The Bible is within itself a text- 
book for training. But the inquiry arises: Is the Bible, 
in its own words, without note or comment, suited to 
the school room? Will it of itself impress its ethical 
teachings upon the moral nature of youth? Are its les- 
sons suited to the grades of child understanding? Does 
this Master Book speak to the child through mandates 
and precepts, through its character narratives, its his- 
torical records, its warnings and judgments, and from 
the mouth of Him who is the Word? Yes, in all these 
ways the Bible speaks. 

The child, as a child, is provided for in the Com- 
mandments. Moses commanded the teaching of the 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 97 











. The Grandchildren of Native Alaskan Indians 
Educated at Sheldon Jackson Institute 


, 


‘‘The Bible is set to accomplish the Elevation of Every Race’ 


* 


98 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





law and the statutes to the children in the home and 
beyond the home continually. It was only the youth, 
trained in those counsels, that could enter into the — 
promised land. The same teaching was not so effective 
upon their obdurate sires. These statutes and com- 
mandments were sufficient for the child Samuel, Israel’s 
greatest statesman and prophet between Moses and 
David. They were sufficient, for the child Josiah, 
brought up under Temple teaching, to become one of 
the most highly commended kings of Judah. Daniel, 
the prophet and statesman, never wandered away from 
God’s moral counsels, which he received during the 
first twelve years of his life. From a child, Timothy 
was instructed in the writings of Moses and of the 
prophets. In serving these outstanding characters so 
efficiently there is presented a direct display of the suffi- . 
ciency of the Bible within itself for imparting moral 
counsel to the child in the school room. No human 
brain will ever by any known method of thought-com- 
munication, improve upon the story of Joseph, or of 
Moses before Pharaoah, of Ruth and Naomi, of Esther, 
of Elijah and Ahab on Mt. Carmel, of the Sermon on 
the Mount, and many other outstanding deliverances. 
Fence the Bible is at home in any circle of youth. 


(1) Anonymous Morat TEACHING IS NOT BIBLE 
Mora TEACHING 


Moral teaching, however true to standards and to 
form, has not always the same force and value. The 
“who-said-it” determines in its last analysis the signifi- 
cance of a moral lesson. This is true generally of all 
utterances. The discovery of a bona fide unpublished 
manuscript from the pen of Shakespeare would be 
announced around the world. The same writing would 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 99 


go begging if its publication should be sought by an 
unknown writer. The most ordinary statement from 
President Coolidge commands a nation’s attention, when 
the same utterance, if it had been made by the man Cal- 
vin Coolidge when a private citizen, would never have 
gotten into the daily press. Many a rejected manuscript 
carries every point of merit but that of a name already 
established in the literary world. The fact prevails on 
every hand, and finds its best illustration in the superior 
force of Bible utterances over all others. To that phase 
of our discussion attention is now directed. 


We mean by anonymous moral teaching a presen- 
tation of Bible morals without giving the Bible as 
authority for such. The giving of a moral truth in the 
phraseology of a current proverb or some snappy 
maxim, is the accentuated display of this evasion. 
When moral teaching rises no higher than this form 
of anonymous teaching then the homely philosophies of 
“Poor Richard’s Almanac,” from the pen of Ben Frank- 
lin will serve the purpose quite as well. The paraphras- 
ing of a Bible moral utterance may reach the mind as 
an abstract truth, but no more exerts a positive influence 
upon the moral nature than such mottoes as “honesty 
eine DESt policy, —— murder will out,” “a lie is never 
justifiable,’ and many other terse statements of truth. 
They lack that moral quality of authority, centered in 
a personality which carries in himself supreme excel- 
lence, and the right to command. In all of God’s moral 
commandments and precepts He makes His authority 
and His Personality to appear conspicuously in the 
utterance. The truth is in all of God’s moral counsels, 
but the projectile force that drives truth home to the 
moral nature 1s in God who speaks the words. God’s 


39 66 


i100 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





words carry every quality of His attributes, not except- 
ing His omnipotence. Without the Divine property 
inhering in His words, the Ten Commandments would 
rise in value little above the current maxims which the 
mind apprehends as truth in the abstract. The Divine 
imperative is the force behind the command, without 
which the moral utterances of the Bible would be con- 
sidered on the plane of advice. This manner of giving 
God’s moral counsels anonymously in the school 
room, common in these times, is essentially moral 
cowardice. It leaves God out of it. 

In support of this contention for God’s personal 
identification ‘as author of His moral ‘utterances, 
attention is directed to the august occasion of the 
giving of the Moral Law. The majesty of God’s person 
was attended by fire and the quaking of the Mount, 
and the voice of the Trumpet sounding louder and 
louder. In this awe-inspiring manifestation of the 
Divine presence “God spake all these words.” Not 
Moses, not Aaron, but God Himself. And as “the Word 
of the Lord endureth forever, the quality of endurance 
was stamped upon the Law, in the fact that God spake 
the words, and also that the words “were written with 
the finger of God.” Moses, who fashioned the plates, 
might have been commissioned to do the writing, but 
the giving of the Law to mankind, once for all, must 
bear every stamp of its Divine Author in His excellence, 
majesty, holiness and authority; hence God Himself 
spake, wrote and gave His law to the people, and thereby 
set forth His authority by accompanying that law with 
His voice and presence... No other distinct revelation is 
found from Genesis to Revelation that so emphasizes 
the majesty of Divine authority, and so displays the 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 101 


presence and the power of the Almighty God as does 
the august occasion of the giving of the Law, excepting 
only the appearing of the glorified Lord Jesus to the 
Patmos exile. From Sinai God spake to mankind. From 
Patmos, Christ the Lord and King, spake to His church- 
es. In each instance the message was both written and 
spoken. But it is clear that the august drama, staged 
at Sinai, was to establish in the most solemnly impres- 
sive manner the source of the Law, God’s personal iden- 
tification with its deliverance, and its binding obligation 
upon all. 

Hence we may understand that the giving of moral 
teaching apart from the Bible, its parent source, reduces 
such teaching to the level of man’s moral counsel. In 
its anonymous character there is lacking the element of 
authority, and it is appraised~as a mere consensus of 
public opinion. But to give the same teaching as the 
expressed command of the Almighty, it is at once ele- 
vated to the degree of supreme authority. It exerts an 
influence upon the moral nature and the human will 
that can never be affected by moral truth given in gen- 
eralities. We need not marvel that God so often affixed 
the Divine stamp upon his deliverances in the words, 
“T, the Lord hath spoken it.” 

For these reasons we are led to appreciate the fact 
that the force and value of moral law is to be found 
not only in the quality of that law, but in the source 
of it.» If such law be but the dictum of man, then it 
rises no higher in the scale of values than the author, 
man. But on the other hand, if the moral command 
comes in the words of the Almighty God, then His 
supreme authority is brought to bear for the answer of 
obedience. In view of these things, and in view of the 


102 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 


Divine personality in the Word, it is urgent that the 
source of moral truth should have universal recognition. 
And most certainly it is time to stop this “pussy-footing”’ 
with the Bible in the schools, taking its pure gold and 
paying it out after having defaced the superscription | 
upon the coin. Let the child which has been given the 
moral coin, see whose “image and superscription’’ it 
bears. Do this for the sake of full value in the unde- 
faced coin. Do this for the sake of common honesty. 
The educational authorities everywhere should abandon 
the “speak-easy” delusion and deceit, the practice of 
which does violence to the constitution of the child, 
through the disappointing effort of educating the intellect 
to the neglect of its moral nature. 


THE CONTRAST OF THE FORMER PuBLIC SCHOOL WITH 
THE MopERN SCHOOL 


The fine product of Bible influence in the public 
schools belongs to an earlier period. The modern 
methods of homeopathic moral teaching, and given 
anonymously, suffer in a contrast with the times in which 
the Word of God was read daily in every school. Those 
were the days before the European hordes came over, 
and put the alien stamp upon our cities; before these 
benighted and priest ridden aliens interpreted (?) for 
us our constitution, and before they were marshalled by 
those minions of their pontifical master in the Roman 
vatican to banish the Bible from the schools, thus leav- 
ing us to teach moral truth anonymously or not at all. 


In those better days of our schools and of our re- 
public, when the Bible functioned openly in every school, 
when moral teaching prevailed, and character was the 
first consideration in the child’s education, in those days 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 103 








there were no unmentionable immoral vices and diseases 
in the school world, such as now are prevalent in many 
of the centers of population. In those days there were 
no highway robbers, no burglars and bandits and gross 
licentiates among school boys and girls, such as are to 
be found among youngsters of the high school age of 
today. 

Explain this moral defection of modern youth as 
we may, it is not satisfactorily explained without having 
to admit that the banishing of the Bible from many of 
the public schools paves the way for the giving up of a 
pronounced moral teaching in such schools. In other 
words, there is no sound and efficient moral instruction 
in those schools where the Bible has no place. 


In support of this declaration we quote.from a writ- 
ing by the Rev. G. J. Rosseau, of Pensacola, Fla., in 
which he is discussing “Crime Among American Youth.” 
Under a subdivision in his article he charges that the 
distinct cause of increasing crime among youth” is the 
brand of education to which the youth of America has 
been exposed during the past twenty yeats or more.” 
Hear him further: “A teacher investigated recently 
about 1,300 school readers and spellers in the Congres- 
sional Library at Washington. He found that those pub- 
lished around 1776 showed 50 percent of the material 
on religious topics, 22 percent on moral, and 28 percent 
on other lines; while those published around 1920 showed 
zero percent on religious matters, three percent on moral 
topics and 97 percent on other subjects.” Says Mr. 
Rosseau, further, “Is it any wonder that present day 
youth with only three percent of moral equipment and 
97 percent of paganism and materialism, should kick 
over the traces, disdain social convention, defy law and 


104 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 


set out to achieve by the aid of the gun, burglars’ tools, 
dynamite and automobiles, that which their education 
has taught them to be the chief end of life—material 
acquisition ?” 

To the above arraignment of present day laxity of 
sound moral teaching, the author would direct attention 
to the disappearance from many of the schools of any 
distinct department of moral instruction. Moral science 
once had a place, but where is it now to be found in a 
public school? Let the investigator, if he will, inquire 
and learn what has become of the text books on morals 
and moral science, that once had a place in every school 
curriculum. He will find no text books on ethics, and 
no department of moral instruction in those schools 
which have discarded the Bible. It may be stated, no 
Bible, no systematic moral teaching. It is a logical 
sequence if the fountain be shut up, the outflowing 
stream will dry up. When the Bible is taken from the 
schools the great Moral Teacher, the chief safeguard 
of youth, has been taken away. In the going of the 
Great Light the lesser lights foilow, leaving the school 
without its moral guide. 


“UEELLITTLECRED, SCHOOLS MOUSE. 


Notwithstanding the new methods, and the boasted 
improvement in modern education under expert teach- 
ers, with every facility and convenience as found in the 
great highly organized city schools of the present day, 
“the little red school house” in the village, and the un- 
janitored cross roads school did a business in their day 
that makes the modern school suffer by the contrast. 
They produced the giants and stalwarts in their day that 
led the nation in every great crisis. Every moral 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 105 


achievement during the past one hundred years is trace- 
able to those little school houses. They made their day 
illustrious and immortal. Those teachers, with their 
Bibles and their old-time “blue-back’’ spellers, and 
McGuffey’s readers, and Murray’s grammars, were the 
“Mark Hopkins” of their day. They area cloud of 
witnesses for Bible morals in the nation’s schools, not 
to go unheeded in these degenerate days. They point 
to the illustrious history which their disciples have made, 
saying in effect, These are our pupils; show us yours. 
The sufficiency of the dear old Book has been well de- 
monstrated in the school room. The contrast of the 
modern school with that of former days is sufficient to 
establish the point. - 


(2) THe ADAPATATION OF THE BIBLE FOR MoRAL 
INSTRUCTION ; 


A distinguishing feature of the Bible for imparting 
moral instruction is, that it presents the Author and His 
Spirit in all its didactic teachings. There is no mistak- 
ing of the Person doing the talking. Throughout the 
Scriptures this distinctive mark abounds in such expres- 
sions as ‘walk before me,” “walk with me,” “learn of 
me,” “hearken unto me,” “come unto me;” “my son, for- 
get not my law; but let thine heart keep my command- 
ments; write them upon the tablets of thine heart; so 
shalt thou find favor and good understanding in the sight 
of God and man.” The Bible so displays this element 
and quality of effective moral teaching that the Divine 
personality of the Author becomes a part of the message. 

The Bible also meets the condition of a universal 
moral need in its one universal message. The writings 
of men are naturally directed to some nationality, often 


1066 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





to a special class as to intelligence, to age, sex or social 
relations; to moral» social or political problems. But 
never yet has a human being risen up equal to the task 
of directing a comprehensive message at once and for- 
ever to the whole human family, as appropriate to the 
purpose in one age as in another. There is no such 
message possible to the human brain. There never was 
the intelligence and capacity for the stupendous under- 
taking of instructing mankind in the fundamentals of 
right living. But heré is a Book from God, for all man- 
kind, for all time, and suited to every creature of under- 
standing, young or old, high or low, intelligent or 
ignorant, moral or immoral. That Divine Book in speak- 
ing to the multitudes at the same time speaks to the in- 
dividual, as if he were standing alone in the presence 
of the Author. And why should not the Book meet 
this purpose, since it is the Creator speaking to His 
own creature? Even the “wayfarer and the fool” are 
embraced within the Divine counsels; much more is the 
child. 
THE BIBLE SUITED TO THE COMMON UNDERSTANDING 
The first demonstration of the efficiency of God’s 
moral counsels, on the occasion of giving the Moral Law 
to the mixed multitude at Sinai’s base, forever settled the 
question of adaptation of God’s utterances for all classes. 
Himself the teacher, using His own Word, He spoke 
to the assembled host. That gathering represented every 
degree of understanding, and every stage of moral im- 
perfection; and their ready response to this first lesson 
in God’s morals ought to silence every caviler, objecting 
to the fitness of the Bible for the direct moral instruc- 
tion. Ever since that epochal day it has been demon- 
strating its fitness for the moral instruction of the race. 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 107 





Since the Bible comes to us in a vocabulary of less 
than six thousand words, more than half of which are 
words of one syllable, we marvel over its clearness, its 
simplicity and its force. We look in vain for similar 
qualities of excellence in other works. Its counsels re- 
quire no exposition; but just as God spake, His words 
reach the understanding of every state of intelligence. 
No other utterance grips the mind of a Milton, an 
Edwards or a Newton, and at the same time, and in 
the same words, reaches the mind of the child. Onlv 
God can do that. Man’s effort would be directed to the 
sage or to the child, not to both, in the same utterance. 
If to the child it would go in the vocabulary of the 
nursery. But the Bible reaches the child’s understand- 
ing without “baby-talk.” And whilst the Bible is not 
a nursery book, yet it is pre-eminently the Book for 
child life, for the foundation of character and its con- 
tinuous development. “Thou shalt teach them diligently 
unto thy children.” 


THE VERSATILITY OF THE BIBLE IN MORAL INSTRUCTION 


This versatility is displayed in the many spheres 
of knowledge it covers, and in the variety of its sub- 
ject matter. It explores the whole realm of moral truth, 
leaving Divine light to shine forever upon its explora- 
tions. The perfectness of the law of the Lord consists 
as much in the variety of knowledge it reveals, as in its 
chosen and purified words. “The Law of the Lord is 
perfect” from every viewpoint,—perfect in substance, 
perfect in expression of God’s mind, and perfect in its 
scope. The moral quality is distinct in every style of 
the literature of the Bible; and whether it be that of 
history, biography or narrative, poetry or proverb, 


108 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





didactics or exposition, the moral lesson is in it, and is 
impossible of evasion. 

In variety of subject matter, though precept be upon 
precept, it is never a “twice told tale.” If it repeats a 
lesson, it is to give it a new setting, for additional in- 
struction. When it rehearses Isrel’s deliverance from 
Egyptian bondage and their wilderness pilgrimage, it 1s 
to set forth in some new light God’s marvelous pro- 
vidence, His patience, His justice and love. When it 
recites a Divine judgment it impresses anew God’s uni- 
versal reign, and man’s accountability to Him. It reiter- 
ates truth in “line upon line,’ yet without weariness or 
the suggestion of monotonous repetition: It does tell it 
again and again, but to meet new conditions. Again and 
again it surveys anew in the field of knowledge, but it 
is never to follow a surveyed line, or to set it aside for 
one more correct. Every expression found in the 23rd 
Psalm is to be found in other Scriptures, but it is not 
counted as repetition by the countless numbers of souls 
that have been sustained by its ministry. Hence the 
Bible will always be “the light of the world.” It bears 
the wisdom of God in all its utterances, and to the end 
it is destined to be man’s moral and spiritual guide. 

Again, the Bible makes clear the great funda- 
amentals that relate man to God. Every Divine perfec- 
tion, embracing His power, holiness and infinite wisdom, 
is brought to the comprehension of the child mind. | 
The book of Genesis furnishes the authentic and credible 
story of creation, even the creation of man, and his re- 
lation to his Creator. And these things are given as 
verities, not suppositions and guesses; and they are given 
because impossible of discovery by man without the 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 100 





guidance of Divine revelation, the Evolutionist to the 
contrary notwithstanding. 

In the child’s education, when he is taught history, 
let him begin at the beginning of history, as God gave 
it to Moses. In learning history from that source he 
will get in addition to the accounts of historic events, 
the philosophy of history. If in the study of geology 
he is searching for the footprints of creation, the Bible 
will lead him to God’s history of creation, where mystery 
is cleared up, and every hypothesis, every conjecture, 1s 
tried by a “thus saith the Lord.” If he is a student of 
civil government, the Bible will inform him that human 
government is ordained of God, that every principle of 
righteous government is given in the Book. Let the lad 
sit at the feet of Moses, the founder and builder of the 
most influential nation of antiquity, enduring a thousand 
years; or let him study the life of Joseph, Egypt’s Prime 
Minister; or Daniel, the model hero and prince among 
statesmen. And if the pupil becomes a student of moral 
philosophy, let him sit at the feet of the Teacher of all 
teachers, of whose teachings Thomas Jefferson has well 
said: “Of all the systems of morality, ancient and mod- 
ern, which have come under my observation, none ap- 
pear to me to be so pure as that set forth by Jesus.” 
Whoever aspires to leadership in statecraft, is reminded 
by Coleridge that “the Bible is the best statesman’s 
manual ever written.’”” Statesmen of the largest mould 
and broadest vision, such as Burke and Gladstone, 
Lincoln and Wilson, studied the Bible, made it “the man 
of their counsel,” and by its guidance preserved 
cherished institutions, popularized natural rights, and 
even opened up new fields of human liberty for the ad- 
vancement of civilization. In these citations there ap- 


110 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





pears the wondrous versatility of the Bible in the broad 
field of education, and in addition, its sufficiency for 
every stage of life. 


Moreover, the versatility of the Bible is conspicuous 
in the varied styles of its literature. History, biography, 
narrative, parable, proverb, poetry, prophecy and didactic 
exposition—all appear in variety, and all bear the stamp 
of Divine majesty and supreme authority. Taken in all 
its parts, the Bible is universally acknowledged to be the 
noblest and the profoundest of all literature; and in the 
English translation it is conceded to be the unrivaled 
classic. 

In the charm of narrative, the story of Joseph will 
always hold prestige. In the career of Daniel, the exile, 
the record of his rise to eminence and power in two of 
the great world empires, told in the most beautiful sim- 
plicity, will preach forever the foundation principles of 
right living and its sure reward. The book of Esther 
presents a beautiful story beyond criticism, unrivaled 
by O’Henry or Kipling, and is unsurpassed in all litera- 
ture. The book of Romans is appraised by many great 
jurists as “the most profound writing in existence.” And 
withal, the Bible is accorded the distinction of contain- 
ing a book that surpasses in sublimity and majesty every 
other writing in the world,—the book of Job, written 
so long before Moses and the beginning of written Re- 
velation, that the modernists name the time as “the stone 
age,’ when trees and caves were man’s habitation, and 
animal skins his clothing. But when the evolutionist and 
the higher critic can point to some latter day literary 
production that can stand in the class with this lofty 
composition, then will it be in order to listen to their 
sinister disparagements of the Bible. 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 111 


So, open the Book where we may, a distinct charm 
attends its utterances, whether spoken by Moses or 
David, by Isaiah or Daniel, by Luke the historian, John 
the seer, or Paul the master interpreter of Christ and 
His teachings. Confronted by this profusion of knowl- 
edge, with its wonderful versatility in literary expres- 
sion, we are told by a class of opposers, the majority 
of whom are Bible ignoramuses, that this Treasury of 
Knowledge and Wisdom has no educational value to give 
it a place in the public schools of America. 

This Master Book which has been functioning as 
God’s Teacher of moral truth from the hour of its going © 
forth out of His mouth, doing business in the training 
of the child since Sinai’s eventful day, is now called 
upon to retire from the school rooms of the nation. This 
demand comes from an element of opposition in hopeless 
minority. In this proposed dethronement of the Bible 
in the education of our youth no substitute for that Book 
is offered. But when the fact arrests public attention 
that there is no substitute for the Bible in any Sphere of 
its ministry, then this demand will cease; and the Bible 
will continue unopposed in the school room as _ the 
child’s moral instructor. 

THE BIBLE SAFEGUARDS AS WELL AS RESCUES 

In the common estimate of the power of the Bible, 
we limit its field to the arresting of evil rather than 
extend it to the nurturing and safeguarding of the un- 
corrupted. The Bible has functioned so long, and almost 
exclusively in the sphere of the reclamation and reform- 
ation of broken lives, that we must be reminded of the 
finer work of its ministry in its moulding the character 
of the guileless child. We have so magnified the Bible 
as an agency for rescuing the wayward, for reclaiming 


112. The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 





outcasts, above its power to safeguard the undefiled, 
that the common man is not appreciated as a fit subject 
for its effective ministry until he has become a moral 
reprobate. But despite this perverted notion, the Bible 
is not more potent for rescue work than for safeguard- 
ing the undebauched. We readily acknowledge its ex- 
cellency for the rescue and the remaking of moral de- 
linquents, and even moral wrecks, yet we have given it 
slight appreciation as God’s mighty instrumentality for 
the preservation and nurture of child life. In figure, 
we have been indifferent about the safe-keeping of the 
‘horse in the stable, but after its escape we become con- 
cerned for its recovery. We have laid the emphasis 
upon restoration rather than preservation. But why re- 
storation instead of preservation? “Prevention is better 


I 


than cure;” and formation than reformation. 


MopEerRN EpUCATION INCLUDES A KNOWLEDGE 


OF THE BIBLE 


The Bible permeates both secular and sacred litera- 
ture. It is more quoted than all other books. The edu- 
cated man who is ignorant of the Bible is simply not 
liberally educated. A knowledge of Biblical history is 
an indispensable acquisition for modern education. In 
its account of the primitive history of the race the Bible 
has no contemporaries. Without its faithful records 
we would grope in darkness to this day over the origin 
of man, somewhat as the purblind evolutionist, who 
seeks light from the sources of darkness, who places 
his fallible interpretation of a fossil above the infallible 
“thus saith the Lord.” In this oldest of all histories 
(the only history that begins at the beginning), the ac- 
count of the patriarchs, the growth of families into 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 113 


tribes, tribes into nations, the scattering abroad of the 
races over the earth, the rise and fall of the great empires, 
—all these make the Bible a necessity in the ground werk 
of civil government. It is learned nowhere else. It 1s 
here that the essential elements of right living are 
learned, learned at the source And the learning of these 
things in childhood gives a new and safe direction to the 
whole life. Most certainly then, the public schools every- 
where should give the Bible first place in the curricula, 
as the world’s best text book and teacher. 


THe BIBLE IN ITSELF IS THE WoRLD’S BEST TEACHER 


Very few text books may be classed as self-instruct- 
ing. ‘This fact makes it necessary for the teacher to 
supplement them. But in the records of Biblical his- 
tory, of biography and of the direct moral command- 
ments of the Bible we find no need of supplementary 
helps. The Book is a self instructor. And since the 
Bible is its best interpreter, its teachings must be clear 
and simple, and without ambiguity. ‘The wayfarer and 
the fool need not err therein.”’ Certainly the Creator 
knows how to teach and guide His creatures. No other 
communication of moral truth carries such inherent 
power in the expression of it as does the Bible. It speaks 
always with an impelling authority, and always reaches 
the understanding and the moral nature as no other 
utterance can. 

Furthermore, in the history of Judah and Isrel, 
from the reign of David to Zedekiah, the Book carries 
more clear information about the moral fact of reaping 
that which was sown, than is to be found in all the 
ponderous volumes of Gibbon, of Hume and Ridpath. 
A distinguishing feature of Bible history is in its facility 
for carrying the moral quality along in the record, with- 


114. The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 


out the impairment of the historic value. Bible narra- 
tives of life and events have been so given as to impress 
the moral teaching first of all; and they so blend the 
historical and the moral as to make obedience to God’s 
moral laws, on the one hand, and the bitter fruit of 
disobedience on the other, the outstanding and the em- 
phasized lessons. The moral lessons of Divine history 
carry every quality needed for teaching and influencing 
the child mind. 


BrBLE TEACHING MAKES A BIBLE NATION 

Those elements and influences which operate to 
make a nation nominally Christian, all find their source 
in the Bible. Those fundamental truths composing a 
kind of natural religion, distinguish the Bible taught 
nations from those of paganism, pantheism and Moham- 
medism. Among those elemental truths are (1), the ex- 
istence of the one Almighty and Everlasting God, who 
is the Omnipotent Ruler of the Universe; (2) man is 
His creature, made in His own image, and subject to 
Him in all things; (3) God’s righteous reign is over 
every human being, including the kingdoms and gov- 
ernments of this world, as “Lord over all; (4) God’s 
hand of providence and of judgment is upon the nations, 
to display His special favor upon those who govern 
righteously and in the fear of God, and to execute judg- 
ment upon the people who despise His law. The Bible 
puts its stamp upon nations, as it does upon individuals. 
Borrowing the thought (not the words) of Wendell 
Phillips, it may be somewhat concisely given in anti- 
thesis: The answer to the Shastra is India; the answer 
to Confucianism is China; the answer to the Koran is 
Turkey; the answer to the Bible is. Protestant Chris- 
tianity in Europe and America. 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 118 


Modern text books seem to take great pains to 
ignore God in human affairs. In former times the school 
readers abounded with moral lessons, but the latter day 
text books barely acknowledge the Supreme Creator and 
Ruler, and still less do they refer to His Personality. 
The very neglect of this teaching all the more urges the 
use of the Bible to give this indispensable teaching. The 
Book faithfully repeats it that the God of the Bible is 
the Governor over the nations. And it points to His 
judgments upon those nations that have perished. A 
correct understanding of history, therefore, must em- 
‘brace not only information about world events, but must 
include the ability to use the Bible perspective whereby 
we see God’s overlordship in them all. And this is not 
to be supplemental to public school training, but a part 
of that fundamental education which is essential to 
everyone, and which is necessary to a correct and in- 
telligent understanding of God’s purpose and program in 
human affairs. ; 

In summing up, the author submits that the suffi- 
ciency of the Bible in itself for moral instruction is made 
and sustained. We are bound to conclude that the best 
text book of moral instruction in all the world is the 
Bible; that in many departments of instruction its edu- 
cational value cannot be justly appraised. Into whatever 
department of knowledge we find ourselves delving, we 
may be absolutely sure that we shall find no such clear 
and faithful, pure and lofty, engaging and compelling 
instruction as that which is set forth in the Bible. 

And yet with this priceless treasure of moral counsel 
in our hands for the guidance and welfare of the nation, 
we are confronted with the grave situation of having 
approximately ten millions of America’s youth without 


116 The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 








moral training in the home, in the schools or anywhere 
else. They are beyond the pale of any class organized 
to arrest a downward career. They are destined, without 
compass or rudder, to moral shipwreck on the sea of life. 
Our system of education must be made effective for their 
safety and their development into useful citizens; other- 
wise they may easily become a formidably potential force 
for the nation’s undoing. 

The high purpose of State Education is confessedly 
to develop moral character in the rising generation for 
the duties of citizenship. The God-given lessons and 
counsels for the formation of character are treasured 
in the Bible and so given that moral truth becomes well 
nigh irresistible. In view of these things this appeal 
is for our country’s stability, and ascendency among 
world powers, and for this vast horde of hapless youth 
that are to become the citizens of tomorrow, with a 
state’s destiny thrust upon them to meet the responsi- 
bility. The question naturally arises, shall they become 
qualified by every method of training needfui for good 
citizenship, or shall we bind the rising generation by 
a God-less, moral-less education, to work the ultimate 
undoing of our self-governing nation? The threatened 
debasement of any considerable element of a _ na- 
tion involves the welfare of the whole social order, even 
the very fabric of government; for the destiny of any 
large element of citizenship, necessarily involves the 
destiny of the government itself. Now, in the last analy- 
sis, we are endeavoring to render that character of train- 
ing in the school room that will avert the possibility of 
such a calamity. The place of the Bible in our State 
schools as the pre-eminent moral teacher, will safeguard 
our stability, and will assure our supremacy in everything 


The Sufficiency of the Bible for Moral Instruction 117 








that is worth while. But to reject that Book is in effect 
the rejection of moral teaching in the schools; and that 
would invite the fore-announced sentence of Divine 
judgment: “The nation and Kingdom that will not serve. 
thee shall perish.” From the beginning of nations it 
has been true that God’s Book makes nations; and it also 
preserves nations. 


“When thou art rome unto the land which the Gord thy 
God giveth thee and shall possess it, and shall dwell there- 
in, and shall say, J will set a king over me, like as the 
nations round about me, mben he sitteth upon the throne of 
his kingiom, he shall write him a copy of thia lam in a 
hook, ont of that which is before the priests and the Devites- 
And it shall be mith him and he shall read therein all the 
days of his life, that he may learn to fear the Lord his Goo, 
to keep all the words of this lam and these statutes to do 
them, to the end that he may prolong his days in his king- 
dom, he and his children in the midst of Israel.” 

Deut. 17, 14-20 


— Clie — 


Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart, 
And his mere word makes despots tremble more 
Chan curr Brutus mith his dagger could. 

Cowell 


— +o CHIID 2» — 


Chelmall thought it very unfair to influence a child's 
mind by inrulcating any opinions before it had rome to 
years of discretion to choose for itself.—J showed him my 
garden, and J told him it mas my botanical garden. “fiom 
so?” said he; “it ig covered mith weeds.”—‘Oh’, DI replied, 
“that ia only because it has wot yet come to its age of dis- 
rretion and choice. Che weeds, vou see have taken the 
liberty to grow, and J thought it unfair in me to prejudice 


the suil toward roges and stramberries.” 
Caleridge 


CHAPTER VI 


Bote POOLPRUN Toe OP SATAN 
REVEALED IN MOVEMENTS TO OVERTHROW 
EU BIBLE: 


(1) SATAN’S OBJECTIVE 

From the viewpoint of the Bible there is brought 
to light the overlordship of the one arch enemy to Divine 
truth, who inspires, organizes and directs every move- 
ment among men to break the force of God’s Word in 
every sphere of its activity and influence. This pre- 
sentation is not that of many enemies and their many 
conflicts, but as one age-long battle in which the citadel 
of truth has been everlastingly assailed by the forces of 
darkness, under the leadership of “the Prince of Dark- 
ness.” These forces appear in many divisions, yet one 
army, under one general, but with one all-controlling 
purpose. And wherever the conflict rages, whether the 
warfare be offensive or defensive, the one goal is the 
overthrow of the Bible, everywhere, in the Church, in 
the school room, in the home, in the hands of the in- 
dividual. And since the throne of the Almighty is estab- 
lished upon Truth, this arch enemy, Satan, has from 
the beginning assailed the truth of Revelation. In brief, 
Satan wants no Bible anywhere among men. His supreme 
objective is the overthrow of the Divine Throne by de- 
stroying the foundation upon which that throne is estab- 
lished. Hence, his chief opposition is directed against 
the Word of Truth. He opposes no organization, civil, 
educational or religious, if the Bible have no place in 


120 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 





it. Satan does not oppose “secular” education. Initel- 
ligence often better serves his cause than ignorance, 
though he uses either in its sphere. Satan makes no war 
upon the school that ignores the Bible. It is the school 
with the Bible in it that arouses in deadly opposition 
the forces of all hell. 


(2) SATAN’S CHIEF INSTRUMENTALITY 

Eis chiefeweapon 1s the, LCI Rs coe cise theeraaes 
of lies.’ No weapon employed by devil or man has 
ever proved so efficacious of evil as the lie, spoken or 
written. Though physical forces and the power of evil 
through the influences of wicked spirits have often been 
employed to hinder and to obstruct God’s way, yet the 
contradiction of truth, and the setting up against truth, 
marks the trail of the Serpent all the way from Eden. 
He 1s the deceiver, in making a lie appear as the truth. 
He is also the imitator, in transforming himself when 
he will into “an angel of light.” He seeks to be “like 
the most High jis Ele is the snaster.counterserter mane 
shall be as gods.” His followers may have “the form 
of Godliness,” but they deny the power thereof. Over 
against Christ’s Church there is the “synagog of Satan,” 
with its organized assembly preaching down regeneration 
and the sacrificial blood, setting up instead reformation 
and character culture. When the good seed of the Divine 
Kingdom, has been sown he “sows the tares among the 
wheat.” He matches the spiritual and supernatural of 
the Gospel of Christ with the natural and the material, 
maintaining “doctrines of devils,” as they are called, by 
vast organizations (counterfeit churches), whose blinded 
followers in believing “another gospel” go to everlasting 
destruction. Satan’s gospel is called “another gospel,” 
because it is a counterfeit message composed of what 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow B'ble 123 


has been termed Part-truth-ism in opposition to whole- 
truth-ism, the purpose of which is to present the false 
for the true, and in the likeness of the true. 


(3) Satan Has No ATTRIBUTE OF THE SUPREME BEING 


He is a creature of God’s creation; “was perfect in 
thy ways from the day thou wast created, till iniquity 
was found in thee.” He was created “full of wisdom,” 
SPeri ecu epeduiy, se aindas the dnomted “cherub that 
covereth.” Since he had a beginning he is not self ex- 
istent, and never can become independent of his Creator. 
“Lucifer, Son of the Morning,” was his heavenly title, 
placing him first in the angelic host. “How art thou 
fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, Son of the Morning!’ 
The chief among the fallen angels, “who kept not their 
first estate, but left their own habitation;” ‘ 
sinned: therefore I will cast thee as profane out of the 
mountain of God.” Christ characterized him as a liar, 
who abode not in the truth; and also as murderer from 
the beginning. ; 

Satan knows the Scriptures to quote them, but not 
to understand the mysteries of God as revealed in the 
Word. He knows not the end and the outcome of his 
rebellion. He is not ubiquitous, but goes about seeking 
whom he may destroy. His final doom to the pit of 
torment, in chains, strips him of claims to omnipresence. 
(Omnipresence cannot be confined.) Neither does 
Satan assume to measure his power by withstanding the 
Infinite power of the Almighty. Christ came, as:Tle 
said, ‘to destroy the works of the devil; and in every 
conflict with “the Prince of Darkness” there was the dis- 
play of the superior power of God over a less power in 
him; and there is no record of Satan ever daring to 
set up his own against the Omnipotent power of Christ. 


thou hast 


122 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


He never resisted His word of command, but submitted to 
the Omnipotent power of Christ, not in the spirit of ob- 
edience, but as an antagonist realizing his inferiority of 
strength. Satan is no rival of God, although he attempts 
It; 


(4) Satan ADHERES TO AGE-LonG METHODS 


The devil has never ceased to attack the Divine 
Word. It is Truth he seeks to overthrow, and there- 
by destroy the throne of God of an infinite perfection. 
During the forty days of that supreme test in the wilder- 
ness between Christ and Satan, the battle raged around 
the Word of God. He pitched the gage of the battle, 
and Christ accepted the challenge. In his assaults upon 
the battlements of truth, his complete vanquishment was 
effected by Christ’s reaffirmation of the Scriptures that 
He had uttered through lawgiver, seer and prophet, pre- 
facing the Word with “It is written.’ In that supreme 
contest between “the powers of darkness” and Him who 
is “the light of the world,’ the battle was fought out 
to a finish, with Truth triumphant, secure and steadfast 
as the throne of God. 

There, in that conflict between Christ and his ad- 
versary, was the final and conclusive demonstration of 
the superior and conquering power of truth over the 
false teachings of Satan. And likewise that battle deter- 
mined and forecasted the final doom, under the power 
of truth, of every false teaching. With this triumph of 
truth over error in view, and already accomplished, our 
Lord spoke for everlasting record: “Be of good cheer, 
I have overcome the world.” “The prince of this world 
hath nothing in me.” Despite the many and varied on- 
slaughts upon truth, to follow that decisive battle in the 
wilderness, all other assaults will appear as but the occa- 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 123 


x“ 


sional gunfire that marks the retreat of a defeated army. 
It was demonstrated in that triumphant hour, for all 
time to come, that “the Word of the Lord endureth for- 
ever.’ Satan learned as we also may learn, that “the 
words of the Lord are. pure words; as silver tried in a 
furnace of earth, purified seven times.” And that signi- 
fies that every word of Scripture is the fit word. 


But Satan continues his attacks upon God’s Word; 
and the question arises, why these continued assaults by 
a vanquished foe, who failed even to modify it by adding 
to or taking from the revealed Word. Why do the many 
“pop guns” from apostates in the Christian ranks, make 
a target of the Bible, never ceasing to shoot their little 
paper wads at God’s impregnable Rock? ‘The sufficient 
answer is, that no victory is complete until the last effort 
of a defeated enemy has broken down. The decisive 
battle of the late Civil War was Gettysburg, yet the con- 
flict continued two years to its termination at Appomat- 
tox. The Gettysburg victory was followed up and finally 
ratified by a surrender at Appomattox. The central 
powers in the late World War, under Hindenburg, lost 
their cause on the day of their retreat after Chateau 
Thierry. Even so may we view Satan as defeated in the 
wilderness contest, and confirmed on Calvary by the 
Lord’s own declaration: “It is finished.”’ But Satan would 
defer the day of surrender by the policy of “fire and 
Peiieaiy, 

But after his challenge and his vain assault upon 
the Word Incarnate, the question still arises, Why 
these further sinister attacks through his henchmen, 
among college professors in religious schools, among 
editors of religious journals, and among preachers of 
great attainments and commanding position, inflated 


124 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


SS ees ® 





with “new thought,” and known as “higher critics?” 
Why is it that so many geologists, ethnologists, biolo- 
gists and evolutionists are aligned with Satan, to con- 
tinue this back-fire upon the Bible. For one thing, 
because this master strategist is great in defeat, and is 
alert to turn defeat into victory. Moreover, the van- 
quished foe seeks to save out of his defeat the remnant 
of his resources. Again, if he may not overthrow the 
truth he will seek to cripple it, to break the force and 
power of the Word; that he may continue binding his 
benighted captives; that he may discredit the integrity 
and the trustworthiness of God’s Word, and thereby 
destroy it as a ground of faith and acceptance. 

The very acme of Satan’s minor triumphs, follow- 
ing his defeat in the conflict over the Word, would 
issue first, in his breaking down the credibility of Reve- 
lation throughout the world, and next, of breaking’ the 
credibility of witnesses to the truth, in their lives con- 
tradicting the truth, thereby winning an invaluable sup- 
port to his cause. In his appreciation of values Satan 
conscripts into his service those in the high places of 
Christianity, who discredit the Bible, who set reason 
above Revelation, and the natural above the super- 
natural. He could have used the Apostle Peter, if the 
Lord had consented to the loan. His priceless instru- 
mentality 1s the preacher who has been seduced to the 
preaching of another Gospel. One aggressive Matthews 
sitting in the seat of teacher in a school of the prophets 
can do more towards obstructing the progress of Christ’s 
Gospel than a thousand blatant blasphemers among anar- 
chists. Just one Fosdick, high in pulpit rank and 
power, serving Satan in the livery of heaven, can con- 
firm more people in rejecting the truth and embracing 
rationalism than all the Paines, the Huxleys, the Inger- 


it 


. 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow B'ble 12 





solls and the Darrows of this generation. Satan’s 
chosen vessels hold high positions in the Christian world. 


(5) Satan Now Emprtoys New Tactics 


When Divine Truth broke away from cloisters and 
monasteries of an effete religion, brought about by 
the printing press, it claimed the world for its field, 
and began a new day in its triumphs. That period 
marked the end of Satan’s use of the fagot and the dun- 
geon. That character of persecution would no longer 
avail to the suppression of the truth. The once caged 
bird is now in the open and on the wing. New tactics 
must be set up, to meet.a new situation. For a thousand 
years and more his slogan was Suppression. But 
henceforth his keynote is to be Perversion. By either 
method the end sought is the same,—the shutting cut 
from the people the Divine light of the Gospel of the 
Son of God. Henceforth we may expect a new gospel, 
which in attractive features will rival Paul’s Gospel. 
in support of a gospel of “culture” and “reformation” 
Satan will seek to repudiate the Book as mythical, out- 
worn and untrustworthy. With a cunning that has 
never been approached, and with a master hand, he has, 
during the late centuries, been laying the gage of bat- 
tle; first, over the integrity of the Book, and, second, 
over the doctrines that are fundamental and vital to the 
cause of Jesus Christ in the triumph of His Kingdom. 
With these objectives gained, Satan’s purposes would 
be more effectually accomplished than by his former 
savagery of burning Bibles and Bible believers. 

In this new day of popular intelligence, with the 
Bible as common property in the churches, religious 
societies and fraternal orders, permeating modern lit- 
erature, and in the mouth of the plain people from the 


126 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 





man in the street to those holding the uppermost seats 
of place and power, this arch enemy readjusts his tac- 
tics to invade the new fields, pitching the battle anew, 
and all along the lines. Persecution by the sword, the 
fagot, the rack and the dungeon has become unsuited 
to these modern times, when liberty is in the air, and 
a Bible truth in every one’s mouth. Satan, therefore, 
becomes a patron saint of every ethical virtue of Bible 
teaching, and he seeks to formulate an ethical and social 
gospel that bears likeness to Bible religion, except that 
of grace and the sacrificial blood of the Lamb of God 
for the redemption of the believer. 

Satan now insinuates himself in professors’ chairs, 
from the public school to the university, to pervert the 
truth, to sit in judgment upon the Bible under the guise 
advanced thought,” “modern research,” 
and such like pretensions. Beginning his evil insinua- 
tions and subtle sophistries always with a “speak-easy” 
question of doubt, and persistently employing the ques- 
tion mark of doubt in his first assaults upon truth, he 
makes headway first upon a class of learned “high- 
brows” in convincing such, they are not sure of that 
which they claim to know; and the inevitable results 
of such destructive criticism is an open rejection of 
truth, expressed in the stereotyped words, “we don’t 
know.” And the next and the fatal step easily follows: 
“We do know” that the old interpretation of Bible truth 
is not accepted by the scholars. It is easy enough in 
this down grade process of bewilderment for the cun- 
ning fnind of Satan to supply, under his inspiration an 
interpretation, which appears to the natural and 
the unspiritual man as plausible, pleasing and popular. 
With this class of leaders won over to his disguised 


39 66 


of “learning, 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible i297 


cause, their followers will logically go with them. Thus 
Satan wins by the stealthy processes of a lie. 

Likewise has there been built up in these schools 
and centers of influence a group of rationalists, that 
impudently sit in. judgment upon the Word of God, 
claiming the right to accept revealed truth only as reason 
and judgment approve, and to reject that which does 
not admit of conclusions reached through the process 
of reasoning—in other words, reason exalted above 
Revelation. The logical outcome of such rationalism 
is the rejection of the supernatural in the religion of the 
Bible. And with the supernatural eliminated the heart 
of the Book is destroyed. 

Along every line of procedure for destroying foun- 
dations of truth this vast scheme is in operation. The 
current press lends aid, ever paying tribute to liberal- 
ism, modernism and an up-to-date Gospel message, with 
no accountability and no hell for the unsaved. ‘The 
“picture shows” take pleasure in casting slurs upon 
every phase of the old-time religion. The modern cults 
either discredit or distort the fundamental teachings of 
the Bible, approving only its moral standards, yet deny- 
ing it in practice. Our entire educational system is 
threatened by the domination of a class of educators 
who reject the credibility and the authority of the Bible. 
It is frequently charged that the devil has about taken 
over the educational institutions of America. We may 
be assured that he will appropriate whatever is within 
his grasp that he can use. The baleful effects of this 
corrupting work in these circles already appear in the 
increase in scepticism, liberalism and rank infidelity flow- 
ing out from many of the schools, to awaken the most 
serious apprehensions. And since these “modernists” 
present the Bible as a compound of truth, myth and tra- 


128 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


dition, it becomes easy for such modern sceptics to go 
about rejecting its every vital and fundamental teaching. 


They adhere to the wild and unsupported theories of 








evolution rather than accept the Genesis account of 
creation. They reject Moses and the Prophets, and 
finally they openly reject the virgin birth of the Christ, 
His Deity as the Son of God, His sacrificial death, His 


body resurrection from the grave. These vital truths 
go into the corner stone of Revealed Truth. Why should 
Satan burn Bibles in this day when he can by false inter- 
pretation, corrupt its teaching, and set it at naught in 
the esteem of man? 


(6) Satan’s HAND IN THE PUBLIC SCHOOLS 

In the division of the forces of darkness seeking to 
dethrone the Bible, Satan’s vast scheme of domination 
embraces even the public schools. The more than thirty 
millions of our juvenile population were not to be 
ignored in his program to defeat God’s mighty instru- 
mentality on earth. Adjusting his movements to meet 
an entirely new situation, suiting the means to his ends, 
he promotes a policy in primary education that would 
eliminate the Bible for the moral education of youth. 
In the whole field of the public school Satan does not 
set out to break the force of God’s Word by methods he 
employs in the higher schools of learning. In those insti- 
tutions he sets up “agnosticism,” “scepticism,” higher 
criticism, and the wild speculations of would-be scien- 
tists, to break the power of truth. But here, in the 
public school, with a changed policy, he seeks to banish 
the Bible, and forever bar its re-entrance. In this field, 
since the Bible cannot be explained away to the child 
mind, it must be driven away. 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 12¢ 


He must indeed be obtuse who does not discern 
the hand of Satan in the movement for the elimination 
of the Bible from the whole system of state education. 
In many of the colleges, universities and theological 
schools there is the open denial of the fundamental doc- 
trines of grace, such as the new birth, the indwelling 
spirit, the Deity of Jesus Christ, His virgin birth, His 
miracles, His atoning blood, an inerrant and infallible - 
Bible; these precious things embodied in the dear old 
Book, and confirmed by universal Christian experience 
must go to the junk heap of the world’s outworn reli- 
gions. And in substitution these “blind guides” and 
“false prophets” offer a stone for bread, darkness for 
light, reason for Revelation, ethical culture and ‘“‘behav- 
iorism” in the place of sacrificial blood; in everything it 
is the policy of substitution, in order to break the force 
of truth by a perversion of the truth. In brief, Satan’s 
effort is to banish the Bible from the state schools, dis- 
credit it and reinterpret its teachings in the higher insti- 
tutions of learning and in theological schools, and radi- 
cally pervert its doctrines in the churches. Meanwhile 
the conservative element, obsessed with a sense of 
security, solace themselves with the lullaby—God is on 
the throne, and all is well. 


II—OrGANIZED ROMANISM THE DeEvit’s RIGHT ARM 


The mightiest of all the agencies and forces, under 
Satan, for banishing the Bible from the public schools 
is the Roman Catholic Church. The Papal hierarchy 
vehemently opposes the public school, with or without 
the Bible. If such schools are strictly secular, and do 
not use the Bible at all, then the Catholics denounce 
them as Godless, infidel schools; but if the Bible have 
place in them, then they cry unto heaven against such 


130 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 





profane use of the dear old Book, out side “the Church.” 

Notwithstanding their united opposition and their 
rival church schools, making it impossible for any Papal 
subject to teach in good faith in any public school, yet 
these schools never become so Godless or so Bible 
tainted that they do not work by scheme and political 
intrigue for positions in them as teachers and officers. 
Xeliable data gives it that more than 60 per cent of the 
teachers of the public schools in twelve of our largest 
cities are sworn subjects of the Pope of Rome. They 
withhold their patronage; they fight the state schools 
with an unrelenting vehemence, yet they seek to con- 
trol them by supplying them with teachers. A “hands 
off” attitude towards the public schools would at least 
command the respect of the public for consistency. 

The Romanist, as is well known, contends that the 
Bible is the exclusive property of the Catholic Church, 
Divinely committed to “the Holy Church,” and is to 
be interpreted alone by that body. They deny the right 
of private use and interpretation to all those outside of | 
their fold; and yet they fail to give the ministry of the 
Book to their own followers. In other words, they 
neither use the Bible, nor consent that others use it. The 
withering censure, spoken by our Lord to the Jewish 
ecclesiastics eminently fits the whole Papal hierarchy: 
“Ye shut up the Kingdom of Heaven against men,” “ye 
neither go in, neither suffer them that are entering to 
go in.” And true to their record of a thousand years, 
they have never promoted Bible distribution among the 
people. This attitude towards the Bible, and its distri- 
bution unmistakably identifies the Roman hierarchy as 
Satan’s mightiest instrumentality to suppress Truth in 
all the world. That is what Satan and all the powers 
of darkness stand for; and that is what Rome has been 


Footprints of Sataun—To Overthrow Bible 131 








doing, and contending for, through all the years of her 
dark and bloody history. She has burned more Bibles 
than she has ever distributed among her own benighted 
followers. She has burned more Bibles than are to be 
found in the city of the triple-crowned Pontiff. Only 
a few years since, there was not a Bible to be bought or 
begged anywhere in Rome. Many of Rome’s minister- 
ing priests display an ignorance of Christ’s words that 
is amazing. 

The commission that our Lord gave His Church 
was to preach, preach His Gospel, preach it to all peo- 
ple. It remains yet for that hierarchy to fulfill, or even 
undertake the task, and thereby support their preten- 
tious claims to the vice-gerency of Jesus Christ under 
His appointment. Preaching is simply no feature 
of Romanism. Their system of religion cannot be 
preached. Satan’s gospel must be propagated not by 
the heralding of a message by an evangel, but by state- 
craft, political treaties and a subsidized sword in the 
hands of the state. Individualism is unknown to the 
Catholic religion. A Roman priest would not know 
what to tell a penitent “Philippian jailer,” at his feet, 
crying “What must I do to be saved?” But Satan has 
devised a way of dealing with every class of mankind, 
and has committed to the Roman Papacy his system 
of church propagation, so framed as to meet every per- 
verted state of human life; and that without a word of 
Gospel truth except a perverted truth that denies the 
truth as it is in the Gospel of Christ. The Bible is 
simply not the basis of their faith and practice. They 
preach and teach salvation not supported by any utter- 
ance of the Bible, but, in every detail of the system, is 
contradicted by the Word of God. In the words of 


132 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Buble 





Jesus, “an enemy hath done this;” and he is Satan, the 
arch enemy of Christ, “the deceiver of the whole world.” 

Satan did not undertake to deprive the Roman 
Catholic Church of the Bible. But the system that he 
had devised was not founded on a single unperverted 
Bible truth; so that vast organization is not a New 
Testament Church, or a Christian Church at all, and 
cannot be, with a sealed Bible shut out from all people. 
Satan reverses God’s way of Bible supremacy, and gives 
that hierarchy supremacy over the Bible. With that 
daring and monstrous blasphemy accomplished, the way 
was paved for that church to execute every scheme and 
every policy that he might devise. With Bible authority 
out of the way, Satan assumed authority that has never 
been relinquished, but has evidently increased through 
the centuries. So, with a master’s cunning this “De- 
ceiver” organizes a religious hierarchy, perpetuating 
pagan Rome, giving it a religious veneer, with a system 
not founded on the New Testament, but on the authority 
of the church as Christ’s vice-gerency. In logical se- 
quence this Satanic hierarchy was led to ignore the 
Book, and finally shut out its ministry in their temples. 
In the place of the Bible they have a cunningly devised 
system of forms and ceremonialisms that either per- 
verts or denies every soul saving truth of the Scriptures. 

Evidently the diabolical counterfeit of an organ- 
ized world religion has the purpose, first, to blind the 
minds of its subjects through a false gospel, to cause 
them to believe not the truth, but a lie, and thereby 
seal their destiny to eternal darkness; and next, to mar- 
shal this vast host of blinded and deceived followers, as 
a world power, to lure people everywhere into the pit- 
fall of a counterfeit church, to their eternal undoing. 
This vast hierarchy, the most powerful and most com- 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 133 


plete organization yet conceived for opposing the King- 
dom of Light and Truth, is Satan’s masterpiece. As 
Divine light is by the entrance of God’s Word, his sys- 
tem is devised to shut out the Divine light, to fight and 
flourish under the cover of darkness. The very dark- 
ness enveloping the whole Roman system is its defense 
against Truth and its light. There has been no head- 
way for Romanism wherever the blazing light of Divine 
truth has gone before it. Only in fields of the dark- 
ness of ignorance and sin do their emissaries gain a 
foothold; and no trail of light lingers in their pathway. 
Like certain species of plants that flourish only in the 
dark, cavernous recesses of earth, so has it ever been 
that this deadly Upas flourishes best where Satan’s 
darkness abounds. This explains the consistent atti- 
tude of Satan’s religious hierarchy in avoiding and even 
suppressing open discussion. Rome cannot stand before 
an enlightened discussion of her. claims. Her only 
weapon of force, force to the limit, is no weapon against 
the Light. 

Attention is called to the significant fact that no 
people, no nation under Catholic domination in all the 
world, has attained to the advanced culture and enlight- 
ened civilization that characterizes every people and gov- 
ernment under the sway of Bible Protestantism. In the 
comparison of the two most enlightened Catholic coun- 
tries of Europe with two of the most advanced Protes- 
tant peoples, the contrast supports the indictment that 
Rome flourishes only amidst darkness. Catholic Italy 
shows 37 per cent of population as illiterates; Hungary, 
another Catholic country, shows less than 35 per cent, 
as against England, a Protestant people, less than 2 
per cent, in the Scandinavian countries less than 5 per 
cent: The parallel of the United States and: Canada 


134 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


with Mexico and South America, reflects in greater 
degree upon the pall of ignorance everywhere over- 
shadowing Romanism. Our own Protestant North 
America, not including Catholic Mexico, shows an 
illiteracy of 7 per cent, and that includes the Negro and 
Indian population and the hordes of Roman Catholic 
aliens in our cities. In Canada the showing of illiteracy 
is It per cent. The contrast of Protestant North Amer- 
ica with Catholic South America. and Mexico, after 
more than 300 years of Rome’s domination, shows 70 
per cent illiteracy in Mexico, and in the countries of 
South America, illiteracy ranging from 54 per cent in 
Argentina, to 85 per cent in Brazil. 

These conditions are not accidental, nor are they 
to be explained away by unfavoring climatic or racial 
conditions. The light of Divine truth, having the un- 
hindered right of way in England and in our own coun- 
try, has proven the inspiration for their advancement 
and elevation in all things that indicate human progress. 
On the other hand, the best of Rome’s dominions as 
above shown, remain enshrouded in appalling illiteracy, 
and under the curse of a religious thraldom that shuts 
out the light, enslaves the mind and dethrones liberty 
of conscience, man’s lordliest endowment. Among the 
many lessons of this painful contrast, it confirms the 
principle applying to religious systems as well as to 
individuals, that “by their fruits shall ye know them.” 

In the above survey of Catholic conditions every- 
where, Satan is unmasked as the author and director 
of a counterfeit religion, whose scheme is world domina- 
tion, whose instrumentality is not the God-given Bible, 
with its message of life, but a tissue of lies, supported 
by tradition and maintained by intrigue and the sword; 
whose subjects are enthralled, benighted, oppressed, 


_ Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 135 


pauperized, and cursed with the curse of a soul destroy- 
ing religion. Behind it all, and hidden from all, is the 
master hand of Satan, yet discovered and identified by 
the unmistakable marks of the great Deceiver, the Ad- 
versary of God and man. . 


In this connection the serious attention of the 
reader is directed to some timely utterances of the dis- 
tinguished author and minister, Doctor Edwin D. 
Bailey, in his very able work, Protestants and Catholics: 
“There is a Roman peril, and it is a very great peril. 
It involves New Testament Christianity, American 
Democracy, our public school system, our histories, our 
morals, our economics, our independence, and every 
other important feature of what we call our Christian 
Civilization.” | 

“This may seem like a sweeping and exaggerated 
statement, but it can all be substantiated by a review 
of the issues involved between Rome and the United 
States. And, worst of all, the issues not only affect 
our own country, but the Roman system touches every 
country in the world. ‘The issues are world issues.” 


“The reformation of sixteenth century unearthed 
and exposed the Roman system and called a halt in its 
progress, but it did not destroy it. It drew the indict- 
ment, haled it to the court, gave the case a hearing, but 
adjourned without a final settlement. It won the case 
before the bar of public opinion, but let the criminal out 
on bail,” 


“This is the question: Shall. Roman autocracy, 
Roman paganism, Roman ambition, Roman. taxation, 
Roman tradition, Roman statecraft, Roman intrigue, 
Roman immorality, Roman laws, Roman _ customs, 
Roman education, and Roman usurpations, rule America, 


136 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


rule the world, dictate terms to the world, and prescribe 
the conditions of life?” 

“Or shall New Testament Christianity, New Testa- 
ment Democracy, American equality, American schools, 
American civilization, American altruism, American 
liberty, and American justice prevail?” 

“The conflict between these two systems is irrepres- 
sible. It has come to us unsought. It is aggressive, 
persistent, determined, bold, shameless, confident, flushed 
with many victories, rendered confident by its great 
power, its colossal wealth, its centralized government, 
and above all it is greedy because of the stake involved.” 

“The political struggle in the United States is going 
on under a disguise, but we are not deceived by the dis- 
guise. Rome has made an attack on a certain growing 
organization, which has championed the Protestant 
cause, and she has made a bold dash for complete con- 
trol in New York and in the United States Govern- 
ment. Politicians are afraid to name the culprit in the 
case, the force which is back of the government, the 
cunning hand of Rome, but it is well known that the 
drums are beating to herald a protracted struggle for 
supremacy in this country.” 

“Given an absolutely centralized government, unlim- 
ited financial resources, a complete organization reach- 
ing the remotest parts of the world, a constituency and 
following whose interests are perfectly linked up with 
the success of the organization; add to this a system 
of cunning and intrigue of espionage and deception, of 
secret design and disguised maneuver—what more 1s 
needed to master an unsuspecting world? This is Rome. 
This is the Vatican. (This is Satan.) This is what 
the world must face. It is the most astute and cunning 
foe, with unlimited resources.” 


Footprints of Sataun—To Overthrow Bible 137 


“T do not believe there is any other power in the 
world which is hindering human progress, keeping up 
turmoil, disturbing the peace, demoralizing society and 
defeating Christianity, equal to Rome. Her ideas and 
her ambition are peculiar to herself and are absolutely 
contrary to Christianity and democracy. Yet skillfully 
handled by an unscrupulous hierarchy they are an open 
menace to all good government and demoralizing to good 
morals. Their educational system is intended to train 
the rising generation to the Roman ideas and in doing 
this they are unscrupulous in falsifying history, misrep- 
resenting Protestants, suppressing the Bible, intriguing 
in government, and working along perfectly selfish lines 
to gain all the advantage possible in an open and free 
country.” 


III.—SaTANn’s ALLIES IN OTHER CIRCLES OF RELIGION 


In every moral issue Satan has found allies from 
Christian Churches and religious schools. When he 
would employ a critic of the Word he lays hand upon 
a Biblical scholar. When he would inveigh against such 
fundamental truths as the Deity, the virgin birth, the 
body resurrection of Christ, he looks over the field of 
church people, spots the man of his choice, seduces such 
an one to the advocating of “advanced thought,” of new 
light and the criticism of modern scholarship. The new 
recruit becomes enraptured amidst the flood of Satanic 
light; and taking himself too seriously important in the 
distinction of his new attitude, and unsuspecting his new 
master, he fares forth with “new views” of the old 
truths. In the finished product he is henceforth a 
“liberalist” or “modernist,” to direct his guns upon the 
dear old Book, as a destructive critic of its authenticity, 
its inerrancy, its infallibility, and finally he turns his fire 


138 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Buble 


upon the vital doctrines of grace, through the blood; 
and then to complete his apostasy and treason, he rails 
against the Divine institution of the Church, and pro- 
poses that it be converted into a religious club, with a 
message of “behaviorism” suited to modern times. This 
false prophet is now on the stage of publicity, in the 
limelight, a lieutenant in Satan’s army. Once he pro- 
claimed loyalty to Jesus, and preached His Gospel with 
zeal; but step by step Satan allured him from “the old 
paths” into the labyrinths of speculation and “new 
thought” exalting reason above Revelation; once he was 
a sound orthodox preacher of the Gospel of Christ, but 
now he has-become another Fosdick, or a disciple of 
Dean Matthews, serving the devil “in the livery of 
heaven.” This seduction of a disciple, and converting 
him into a traitor is Satan’s master stroke. 


In seeking to shut the Bible out of the school room, 
it is Satan’s first move to destroy the integrity of the 
Book, as a weapon of the Gospel of Christ. His forces 
are powerfully augmented when he seduces a minister. 
from a high place in Christ’s Kingdom to become an 
assailant of things “written in the Book.” For this rea- 
son Satan more than once wanted the services of the 
Apostle Peter. In all his movement to corrupt churches, 
pervert preachers, and capture colleges, universities and 
theological seminaries, the one purpose is the overthrow 
of the Bible, the success of which would blast man’s 
only hope, and would challenge the glory and the power 
of the Divine Throne. 


Satan’s cause is greatly advanced when he has 
seduced professing Christians to support the measures 
that he promotes. And since results alone concern him, 
he makes no war on those having only the best of motives 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Buble 139 


in their support of an evil cause. Satan wants the Bible 
banished from the schools for the one purpose of break- 
ing it down; but if an ally in the same united effort with 
him thinks he is thereby building up the Book, he appro- 
priates his service without concern for the motive. It 
is not sufficient that motive be justified in the Chris- 
‘tian’s attitude and service. The effects and the influence 
of one’s position in any moral issue, must be taken into 
the reckoning along with the righteous motive. For 
these reasons no professing Christian should be found 
lined up with Satan’s forces on any measure. His rule 
well might be, if Satan advocates a measure he must 
not; Satan seeks to discredit the Bible everywhere, and 
banish it from the schools; he must not. And since all 
of Satan’s doings are works of darkness, he must “have 
no fellowship with the works of darkness.” 

Satan’s cause against the Bible in the schools is 
powerfully augmented by a respectable aggregation of 
deluded souls in the churches, who appear as self- 
appointed custodians or guardians of the Bible, and who 
in fear of a profaning of the Book by the “unmitered” 
spokesman, would confine it to their pulpits and_the- 
ological chairs, and restrict its activities to their own 
limited denominational zones. This attitude, in a small 
way, features the bigotry of Rome, from whence it came. 
In the zeal of such jealous souls for scattering abroad 
the “knowledge of the Lord,” they will contribute to 
the circulation of the Bible among the benighted, to the 
unevangelized and to the heathen; they will even aid in 
placing the Book in the hotels, on ships, in the hospitals, 
in prisons and in the daily press; they will go still 
further, and will provide that the child on the way to 
the school room shall have the Divine Words before 
his eyes as he rides the cars, and looks upon the rocks 


140 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Buble 


and the billboards. But not one line of it, spoken or 
written, will they consent to be given the same child 
within the school room. If there be any other place or 
sphere among men where there is opposition to the Bible 
speaking its message by the simple open reading of its 
Words, the writer does not at the moment recall it. | 
Along with the host of the Bible enlightened he has 
learned from the utterances of the Master Teacher that 
there is no Bible in Hades, and never will be. But he 
finds no teaching that remotely hints of another place 
and sphere denied to the Bible. It ought to be unthink- 
able that the schools for our youth, the nation’s educa- 
tional nurseries, are by the will of heaven denied God’s 
Book. What chapter and verse of Scripture is cited in 
support of such teaching? Nothing less than a positive 
Divine mandate will suffice. No inferences, and no de- 
ductions, but a plain unambiguous “‘thus saith the Lord.” 
But it 1s very thinkable, from both Scripture and obser- 
vation, that Satan consistently opposes the Bible in the 
public schools; since he is known to oppose God’s truth 
from the beginning. . 


In every forward moral movement the organized 
opposition under Satan has had the support of an ele- 
ment from the Christian ranks. Bright and shining 
lights they were in the Kingdom, but deluded souls, led 
to see evil as good, wrong as right, and a cunning lie 
as truth. And without the aid of this character of allies 
Satan would never have triumphed over moral truth, 
or hindered truth. 


Every moral victory achieved confirms the truth of 
the above observation. In the efforts to suppress the 
first printing of the Bible and its circulation among the 
masses, Satan enlisted many of prominence in the Chris- 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 141 


tian world, to say nothing of his conscripting Rome 
entire. In Satan’s long contention for “Church and 
State,’ the mighty Luther, Rome’s powerful adversary, 
was led to stand for that pernicious doctrine, and by 
his powerful influence fastened upon Protestant Germany 
the curse of a State Church. Satan effectually hindered 
the modern missionary movement by the aid of opposi- 
tion from leaders in the churches. The most stubborn 
and unyielding opposition to the abolishment of human 
slavery came from preachers and theologians high in 
religious circles. The great temperance wave that finally 
wiped out the liquor traffic in America, found apologists 
and defenders in some of the most influential pulpits 
of the country. And true to form and the records, 
Satan today decoys a respectable following from the 
high places in the Kingdom of Light, to a co-operation 
with all the enemies of Christ in a Titanic struggle to 
banish the Bible from the field of child culture. And 
what difference is it with Satan, if Rome fights for it 
to strengthen her position and advance her own cause, 
whilst the deluded ally from the ranks of Protestant 
Christendom fights in the same cause for the radically 
different purpose to oppose the union of “Church and 
State?” One contends for no Bible, that Church and 
State may be restored. The others fight for no Bible, 
that Church and State may not be restored. And what 
does Satan care for these opposing religious elements 
lining up under one banner, so long as they support his 
movement to banish the Bible from the public schools? 
History may faithfully record the deplorable fact that 
Opposition to the Bible in the schools was powerfully 
aided by a class of self-acclaiming friends to an open 
Bible’ for mankind, who stood side by side with the 


142 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Buble 


Romanist and the Jew, advocating that which Satan 
has advocated from the beginning. And if the unholy 
cause be won, history would also record the conflict 
as Satan’s triumph, and their lasting shame. 


After centuries of the enlightening power of the 
printing press, beginning with the Bible for the masses, 
popular intelligence has outgrown the fanatical prejudice 
of Bible seclusion, as a closed book, and unused even 
in the sanctuaries of worship. It has been loosed for- 
ever from pulpit and cloister, from monk and priest, to 
go forth everywhere among men speaking its message 
direct to the individual. The scope of its ministry has 
become too enlarged and too varied to be chained to 
pulpits, even to orthodox pulpits. It will no more be 
worn at the girdle of Roman prelates and sacerdotalists, 
ignorant of its life giving words. Henceforth the Book 
must be unhampered and unconfined, as God the Author 
is; at home in every sphere, as God Himself is. Its 
custody is not, and never was, in self-appointed guard- 
ians, but in the powers of heaven; and Satan knows it. — 
But Satan unchained is Satan still at war. When de- 
feated in this issue to banish the Bible from the school 
room he may then be expected to enlist his following 
in a movement to rid the world of the Book by some 
newly devised methods. His tactics may change, but 
the aim, never; and that aim is to destroy the credibility 
of Divine Truth, and thus break down the Bible in the 
Church in the world. 


When the people come into the full understanding 
of the object of State education, that it is to prepare 
the youth of the land for the duties and responsibilities 
of self government under the principles of liberty and 
democracy, there will follow a reaction to the Bible for 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 1.43 


its educative power in the formation of moral character, 
such as finds no precedence since the days of Moses, 
Joshua and Samuel. In that better day coming the pub- 


lic school will be cherished as a department of govern- 
ment for the training of youth in those moral qualities 
that are indispensable to the service of the State. Then 
it will be more fully realized that the high mission of 
State education is to develop in youth those moral quali- 
ties that are requisite to good citizenship; and this train- 
ing is absolutely impossible without the Bible. 


Churchmen and school men have been slow to 
visualize a government built upon the principles of the 
Divine moral law. It seems that many would shrink 
from a State constitution having God in it, and thereby 
acknowledging a State’s accountability to God. Their 
expressed views seem to deny the moral accountability 
of the State. Every State that enacts a moral law 
thereby acknowledges its moral character, and thereby 
becomes responsible for civic righteousness. Monarchies 
and oligarchies may for a long period perpetuate a 
vicious and immoral reign, but the God of nations, 
sooner or later inflicts His judgments upon governments 
according to their evil deeds; and His punishment is 
often conspicuous in some form of calamity, such as 
earthquakes, famine, pestilence and war, using the sword 
to blot out a nation when given over to vice and cor- 
ruption. The downfall of nations, as all history shows, 
is to be traced to an unrighteous and wicked rule. So, 
the morals of the State must appear in just and right- 
eous laws, impartially administered under the principles 
of God’s revealing. A free and self governing people, 
such as ours, cannot endure on any other foundation 
than the Divine principles of equality, right and justice, 


144 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


as given in God’s Word for nations as well as indivi- 
duals. Hence we may understand that nations must have 
to do with the Book, because that Book has to do with 
nations. 

Neither can a free people perpetuate their spirit 
and manner of government by any other means than 
by instilling the principles of civic righteousness, as 
found in Divine Revelation, through the training of her 
youth.. Without such training a government is not trans- 
mitted. The destiny of the State not having been pro- 
vided for, is left to chance, and with it a people coming 
into citizenship without the necessary qualities for self- 
government and its perpetuation. Ours being esteemed 
a priceless heritage must be preserved and perpetuated; 
but it cannot be transmitted with the heart of it cut out. 
Along with our noble institutions and lofty ideals as 
expressed in our laws and our policies of statecraft, 
there must be included above all other precious things, 
our Magna Charta, the foundation of everything of 
value in our civilization. The nation’s schools afford the 
channel for its transmission as no other agency. The 
spirit of freedom and its principles got their first clear 
enunciation from the Author of all human liberty, giving 
in His matchless teachings the leavening truths which 
unlock prison doors, break fetter-bound captives, over- 
throw tyrannous governments, make men free, as free- 
dom had never been known; and _ withal, inspiring 
in lovers of liberty a government whose foundation 
principles are given in His teachings. Their transmis- 
sion to posterity is not less an obligation than our loyal 
maintenance of them for our own welfare and happiness. 


In view of these observations, the State must not 
in a perfunctory manner teach morals. The State must 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 145 


not ignore the Divine Book of morals; if so, it will 
in the end fail of its destiny and high purpose. The 
fruit of such defective teaching will reveal itself in a 
generation of spineless trucklings and moral weaklings, 
unfitted for liberty and unworthy of the legacy of self- 
government. Let us keep in mind that the end of State 
education is not for the self-centered interests of the 
pupil. The State is giving nothing beyond that equip- 
ment which is necessary to good citizenship. She is 
training for citizenship, as the military school of train- 
ing is for the soldier. The benefits to the student 
are, of course, many and varied, but incidental to the 
State’s purpose. Good citizenship, and that alone, is the 
Iigh aim of the State in the maintining of a system of 
public education. And if the aim be less than this high 
purpose, or if the means for this training be deficient, 
then the outcome in the finished product will be dis- 
appointing. The teaching in the school room cannot be 
expected to rise higher than its source. That which 1s 
wanted in the finished product must go into the process 
for the making. 

He is dull of perception who is not impressed that 
the arch enemy is steadily weaving his web about the 
whole American educational system, holding the schools 
with a strangle grip. In view of the many threatened 
perils, and if Satan’s purpose is not checked, the ques- 
tion may well be considered: What of this nation’s future 
but a reaction to European civilization of former times, 
with the leavening principles of freedom destroyed? 
What for education but a God-less, moral-less training 
of man’s intellectual nature, producing the giant and the 
pigmy in the one person? What for the Bible (the real 
issue), but its reimprisonment within the cloister and the 


146 Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 


convent, muzzled of its voice, shut out from mankind, 
and chained to an altar that has never suffered it to func- 
tion in the hands of her ministers? 

The purpose is clear that Satan works in the sphere 
of higher education to pervert truth, to change the Word 
of truth into a lie; and im primary schools to banish the 
Book wn toto. It is obvious that the effect would be the 
same; it is but suiting the means to the one end, and 
that is, to get rid of the Bible, first, mm the schools, and 
next in the churches. If the Bible be denied these 
spheres, what is left for it, after it has been repudiated 
in the realm of Christianity, banished from the field of 
education, and forbidden to speak for itself anywhere? 
Shall it then be relegated to a museum of antique relics, 
to point to an ancient and outgrown civilization, there 
to serve only the claims of the evolutionist, of man’s 
upward (?) climb from the cave? But “He that sitteth 
in the heavens shall laugh.” As surely as that “the Lord 
hath spoken,” that Word is eternal, as God is eternal. 
Every quality in the Deity is reflected in His Word. © 
Every excellence ascribed to Jehovah is also attributed 
to the Word of the Lord. God Himself commends it as 
living, as pure, as having infinite power, supreme wis- 
dom, and as eternal as Himself. These Divine perfec- 
tions invest the Word of the Lord with those qualities 
found only in Jehovah, the Lord of Heaven and earth. - 
Hence Satan, in fighting against God, is doomed to an 
irrecoverable and everlasting defeat. 


But error is to be overcome by the power of truth. 
No false teaching withstands the truth; no more than 
darkness withstands light. Though the Bible be ignored 
by the schools, and for shame, false teaching is pro- 
pagated in the schools that openly contradict the Bible, 


Footprints of Satan—To Overthrow Bible 147 


as do all the teachings of evolution; yet the throne of 
God stands fast, and all that is encompassed in the ad- 
ministration of that throne, in heaven and on earth, is 
just as secure. So, let every false teaching be marshaled 
for the conflict and its final testing. It is just and be- 
fitting that they be tested; and if rejected, to be forever 
rejected. Their coming and going mark a panoramic 
age-long procession of false and lifeless automatons, 
once arrogantly parading as truth, but now consigned 
to the world’s junk heap of “cunningly devised fables” 
and lies, each rejected false teaching bearing the stamp, 
“weighed and found wanting.” The “pulling down of 
the strongholds of Satan” is the mighty work of God, 
through the power of His truth. The battle is. today 
raging around the child, and for the child. The deter- 
mination of the issue is to be forecasted in the part that 
the Divine Book shall have in its training. The devil 
and all his minions among demons and men, and all the 
organized forces of every false religion, have set about 
to deprive the child of God’s moral counsels; but over 
against hell’s defiance is the Divine program’ that com- 
prehends the destruction of Satan and all his works of 
darkness. The Lord hath spoken it: “The Word of 
God is not bound.” No, no more than the sun in the 
heavens is bound. It “shall prosper in the thing where- 
unto I sent it.” | 


a 
Beware lest any man spotl you through 


philosophy and vatn Deceit, after the tranttions 
of men, after the rudiments of the whole world 


and not after Christ. 
Paul—Colossians 2:8 


— +o Cn +. — 


Jrogress of Euil 


We are not worst at once; the course of evil 

Begins so slmuly, and from such slight sourre, 

An infant’s hand might stem the breach with 
clay; 

But let the stream grow wider, and philosophy, 

Age ann religton too, may strive in vain 

Co stem the head-strong current. 


1192 «+ Re» — 


Che worst education in the world, that 
tearhes self-dental, is better than the best that 
teaches euerything else and not that. | 

—J. Sterling 


DIGk le hens WS 


Controlling Moral and Religious Education in the 
Public Schools 


As in most pieces of progressive social work there 
are some who take a too pessimistic view of the con- 
ditions to be remedied, and others who are inclined to 
belittle the wrong conditions because of over estimation 
of what has already been accomplished. 

It has been the purpose in compiling this .digest 
of the laws which control moral and religious education, 
to help both of these classes of workers to an exact 
understanding of conditions as they exist in the United 
States. 

We have divided these laws into three classes. 

1. Those states which require the reading of the 

Bible in the public schools. 


2. Those which simply permit it. 
3. Those which forbid it. 


Some of the states are seeking to go further than 
the bare reading of the Bible without comment. Sev- 
eral plans are being developed in different states with 
more or less success. Some of these are included in 
this digest. That this is a complete survey of these 
plans the author does not claim. Neither time nor 
facilities are at our command to collect, examine or 
tabulate the thousands of local endeavors and experi- 
ments that are being carried on tactfully by wise teach- 
ers who are anxious to do their full share of the work 
of producing a generation whose moral fiber will stand 


150 Digest of Laws 





the strain of the wealth, complexity and luxury of our 
growing civilization. Enough of these will be included 
to give a hint of the possibilities of this work where 
school boards and the public are intelligently sympa- 
thetic toward the aims of Christian educators. 

Laws of the states which require the reading of 
the Bible in the public schools. 


ALABAMA 


School Laws 


Section 626. Reading from Bible in all public schools re- 
quired.— 


All schools in this State that are supported in whole or 
in part by public funds shall have once every school day, read- 
ings from the Holy Bible. 

Section 627. Report of teachers and certificate of superin- 
tendents.— 


Teachers in making monthly reports shall show on the 
same that they have complied with the preceding section, and 
superintendents of city schools in drawing public funds shall 
certify that each teacher under his supervision has complied 
with this and the preceding section. 

Section 628. Public funds, not paid unless Bible read.— 


Schools in the State subject to the provisions of this and 
the two preceding sections, shall not be allowed to draw public 
funds unless the provisions of this and the two preceding sec- - 
tions are complied with, and the State Superintendent of Educa- 
tion is charged with the enforcement of the provisions hereof. 


DELAWARE 


School Laws 
Sec. 1 


No religious service or exercise except the reading of the 
Bible and the repeating of the Lord’s Prayer shall be held in 
any school receiving any portion of the moneys appropriated 
for the support of public schools. 
Sec. 2 

In each public school class room in the state and in the 
presence of its scholars therein assembled, at least 5 verses from 
the Holy Bible shall be read at the opening of such school, 
upon. each and every school day, by the teacher in charge there- 
of; provided that whenever there is a general assemblage of 
school classes at the opening of such school day, then instead 
of such class room reading the principal or teacher in charge 
of such assemblage shall read at least 5 verses from said Holy 
Bible in the presence of the assembled schools as herein directed. 


Digest o f Laws ISI 


FLORIDA 
School Laws 


“All schools in this State that are supported in whole or 
in part by public funds are hereby required to have once every 
school day readings in the presence of each pupil from the Holy 
Bible without sectarian comment. Teachers in making month- 
ly reports shall show on the same that they have complied with 
this section and county superintendents before drawing war- 
rants on public funds, shall ascertain that the payee thereof 
has complied with this section.” 


GEORGIA 
Constitution 


Bible Reading in the Schools 


The following amendment was passed in 1921: “Provided, 
however, that the Bible, including the Old and the New Testa- 
ment, shall be read in all the schools of this State receiving 
State funds, and that not less than one Chapter shall be read 
at some appropriate time during each school day. Upon the 
parent or guardian of any pupils filing with the teacher in 
charge of said pupil in the public schools of this State a writ- 
ten statement requesting that said pupil be excused from hearing 
the said Bible read as required under this Act, such teacher shall 
permit such pupil to withdraw while the reading of the Bible as 
required under this Act is in progress. Such a request in writ- 
ing shall be sufficient to cover the entire school year in which 
said request is filed.” 


IDAHO 


School Laws 
Sec. 1. 

That selections from the Standard American version of the 
Bible, to be selected from a list of passages furnished from time 
to time by the State Board of Education shall be read daily 
in all the Public Schools maintained and conducted by all the 
School districts of the State. 


SOCi2. 

That teachers employed in all such schools shall at the 
opening of each morning session of such schools, read, without 
comment or interpretation, from 12 to 20 verses from the 
Standard American version of the Bible, to be selected from 
a list of passages designated from time to time by the State 
Board of Education. The selection may be prepared in ad- 
vance, but the textual reading shall be rendered from the Bible. 


Sec. 3. 


The teacher shal! not comment upon, interpret or construe 
any’-of the passages or verses read. In response to questions 
from any pupil or pupils calling for, commenting upon, or ex- 


~ 


152 Digest of Laws 


planation, construction or interpretation of any of the verses or 
passages read, the teacher.shall without comment refer the in- 
quirer to his parents or guardian for reply. 


KENTUCKY 
School Laws 


The teacher in charge shall read or cause to be read a por- 
tion of the Bible daily in every class room, or session room of 
the common schools of the State of Kentucky in the presence 
of pupils there assembled and no child shall be required to read 
the Bible against the wish of his parent or guardian. The 
failure of any teacher to conform to this act, shall be cause for 
the revocation of his certificate in the manner provided by law. 


MASSACHUSETTS 
School Laws 


Sec. 31. A portion of the Bible shall be read daily in the 
public schools, without written note or oral comment; but a 
pupil whose parent or guardian informs the teacher in writing 
that he has conscientious scruples against it shall not be re- 
quired to read from any particular version, or to take any per- 
sonal part in the reading. The school committee shall not pur- 
chase or use in the public schools school-books favoring the 
tenets of any particular religious sect. 


MAINE 
School Laws 


To insure greater security in the faith of our fathers, to 
inculcate into the lives of the rising generation the spiritual 
values necessary to the well-being of our future civilizations, to 
develop those high moral and religious principles necessary to 
human happiness, to make available to the youth of our land, 
the Book which has been the inspiration of the greatest mas- 
terpieces of literature, art and music and which have been the 
strength of the great men and women of the Christian era, 
there shall be in all the public schools of the state, daily or at 
suitable intervals, readings from the Scriptures with special 
emphasis upon the Ten Commandments, the Psalms of David, 
Proverbs of Solomon, the Sermon on the Mount and the Lord’s 
Prayer Dettiis provided further that there shall be no denomi- 
national or sectarian comment or teaching and each student 
shall give respectful attention, but shall be free in his own forms 


of worship. . 
NEW JERSEY 


Section 173,, Article” VITI pare *ti oor ine sos. 
compilation of the school law provides as follows: 


“No religious service or exercise, except the reading of the 
Bible and the repeating of the Lord’s Prayer, shall be held in 
any school receiving any portion of the moneys appropriated 
for the support of public schools. 


Digest of Laws 153 





In each public school classroom in the State. and in the 
presence of the scholars therein assembled, at least five verses 
from’ that portion of the Holy Bible known as the Old Testa- 
ment, shall be read, or cause to be read, without comment, at 
the opening of such school, upon each and everv school day, 
by the teacher in charge thereof; provided that whenever there 
is a general assemblage of school classes at the opening of such 
school day, then instead of such classroom reading, the prin- 
cipal or teacher in charge of such assemblage shall read at least 
five verses from said portion of the Holy Bible, or cause same 
to be read, in the presence of the assembled scholars as herein 
directed.” 


It will be noted that the New Testament is excluded 
by this law, and it is generally interpreted as forbidding 
rather than permitting this reading at the option of 
teachers and school boards. 


PENNSYLVANIA 
School Laws 


That at least 10 verses from the Holy Bible shall be read 
or caused to be read without comment at the opening of each 
and every public school upon each and every school day 
by the teacher in charge. 

Provided that where any teacher has other teachers under 
and subject to direction, then the teacher exercising this au- 
thority shall read the Holy Bible or cause it to be read as here- 
in directed. 

That if any school ieachee whose duty it shall be to read 
the Holy Bible or cause it to be read as directed in this act 
shall fail or omit so to do, said school teacher shall upon charges 
preferred for such failure or omission and proof of the same 
before the governing board of the school district be discharged. 


TENNESSEE 
School Laws 


Sec. 1. That at least 10 verses from the Holy Bible shall 
be read or caused to be read, without comment, at the opening 
of each and every public school upon each and every school day, 
by the teacher in charge; provided, the teacher does not read 
the same chapter more than twice during the same session; 
provided, that where any teacher has other teachers under and 
subject to direction, then the teacher exercising this authority 
shall read the Holy Bible or cause’it to be read as herein 
directed. 

Sec. 2. That if any school teacher, whose duty it shall 
be to read the Holy Bible, or cause it to be read, as directed 
in this act, shall fail or omit to do so, said school teacher shall, 
upon charges preferred for such failure and omission and proof 


154 Digest of Laws 





of the same before the governing board of the school, be dis- 
charged. 


Sec. 3. That pupils may be excused from the Bible reading 
upon the written request of the parents. 
Public School Laws, 1920, p. 152. 


Three questions were asked of the Superintendent 
of Public Instruction in each of these states, as to the 
working of the law. | 

Most of them replied that it was working satis- 
factorily, that there was little or no friction between 
the parents and school authorities, and only slight trou- 
ble has been caused by outside agitators. Only Dela- 
ware reported that the law was not working satisfac- 
torily, but gave no explanation. 


SECTION IT 
: Permissive Laws 
In the following states either by constitutional provision, 
or specific law or by executive order or common consent the 
Bible is read in the schools where there is no determined op- 
position to it. 
MISSISSIPPI 
The constitution of the state of Mississippi reads 
as follows: 


Article 1 Section 18 


“No test as a religious qualification for office shall be re- 
quired, and no preference shall be given by law to any religious 
sect or mode of worship; but the free enjoyment of all religious 
sentiments and the different modes of worship shall be held 
sacred. The right hereby secured shall not be construed to 
justify acts of licentiousness, injurious to morals or dangerous 
to the peace and safety of the state or to exclude the Holy 
Bible from use in any public school in this state.” 


The following states have permissive legislative 
enactments : 
INDIANA 


Acts of 1865 Sec. 167, reads— 


“The Bible shall not be excluded from the public schools 
of this State.” 


Digest of Laws 155 





IOWA 


Section 4258 of the Code, 1924: 
sentene Bible shall not be excluded from any public school or 
institution in the state, nor shall any child be required to read 
it contrary to the wishes of his parent or guardian.” 
Usage has left the decision largely to the teachers in this 
State. 
KANSAS 


Section 163 School Laws reads— 

No sectarian or religious doctrine shall be taught or incul- 
cated in any of the public schools, but nothing in this section 
shall be construed to prohibit the reading of the Holy Scriptures. 
Sec. 214. 

“No sectarian doctrine shall be taught or inculcated in any 
of the public schools, but the Holy Scriptures without note or 
comment may be used therein.” 


NORTH DAKOTA 


Sec. 1388. The Bible shall not be deemed a sectarian book. 
It shall not be excluded from any public school. It may, at the 
option of the teacher be read in school without sectarian com- 
ment, not to exceed Io minutes daily. No pupil shall be required 
to read it or be present in the schoolroom during the reading 
theseof contrary to the wishes of his parents or guardian or 
other person having him in charge. 


General School Laws, 1910, p. I12. 


SOUTH DAKOTA 


Sec. 7659. No sectarian doctrine may be taught or incul- 
cated in any of the public schools of the State, but the Bible 
without sectarian comment, may be read therein. 


School Laws, 1921, p.. 94. 


OKLAHOMA 


Sec. 329. No sectarian or religious doctrine shall be taught 
or inculcated in any of the public schools of this State; but 
nothing in this section shall be construed to prohibit the read- 
ing of the Holy Scriptures. 

School Laws, 1921, p. 60. 


The following states allow the reading of the Bible 
by executive order in the absence of law. 


MARYLAND 


The city of Baltimore requires Bible reading. In the rest 
of the State there is no rule established by law, but the practice 
is quite general. 


156 Digest of Laws 


NORTH CAROLINA 


A former State Superintendent of Public Instruction ruled 
“That it would be proper to read the Bible in the opening exer- 
cises without comment.” The schools are generally doing so 
under this ruling. 


RHODE ISLAND 


A decision made by the Commissioner of Public Schools 
70 years ago holds “that the reading of the Bible may not be 
required and is not forbidden. The teacher may read the Bible 
in school or may not as the teacher sees fit, respecting his own 
conscience and reasonably the consciences of his pupils.” 


The following states have settled the matter in 
favor of reading the Bible in the public schools by -judi- 
cial decision, which places the final authority in the 
-hands of the local school boards. 


NEBRASKA 


Nebraska Constitution, Art. viii Sec. 11. No sectarian in- 
struction shall be allowed in any school or institution supported 
in whole or part by the public funds set apart for educational 
purposes; nor shall the State accept any grant, conveyance, or 
bequest of money, lands, or other property to be used for sec- 
tarian purposes. 

The Supreme Court has ruled.— 


The law does not forbid the use of the Bible in the public 
schools. 


The point where the courts may rightfully interfere to pre- 
vent the use of the Bible in a public school is where legitimate 
use has. degenerated into abuse, where a teacher employed to 
give secular instruction has violated the constitution by becoming 
a sectarion propagandist. 


Whether it is prudent or politic to permit Bible reading in 
the public schools is a question for school authorities, but 
whether the practice of Bible reading has taken the form of sec- 
tarian instruction is a question for the courts to determine up- 
on evidence. Every alleged violation must be established by 
competent proof. 


OHIO 


The court can not by injunction prevent the board of edu- 
cation from adopting and enforcing a rule requiring the reading 
of the Bible as a part of the opening evercises of the school. 


It rests with boards of education to determine what instruc- 
tion shall be wsed in the public schools. 


‘Nessle v. Hum, 1 Ohio N. P. 120. 





Digest of Laws 157 
TEXAS 
Texas constitution, Art. I, Sec. 7. “No money shall be 


appropriated or drawn from the treasury for the benefit of any 
sect, or religious society, theological or religious seminary; nor 
shall property belonging to the State be appropriated for any 
such purposes. 

Art. vii. Sec. 5. And no law shall ever be enacted appro- 
priating any part of the permanent or available school fund to 
any other purpose whatever; nor shall the same, or any part 
thereof, ever be appropriated to or used for the support of any 
sectarian school; and the available school fund herein provided 
shall be distributed to the several counties according to their 
scholastic population and applied in such manner as may be 
provided by law.” 

The Supreme Court has held, 

“The holding of morning exercises in the public schools, 
consisting of the reading by the teacher without comment of 
non-sectarian extracts from the Bible, King James version, and 
repeating the Lord’s Prayer and the singing of appropriate songs, 
in which the pupils are invited, but not required to join, does 
not violate Constitution Art. I, Sec. 7 or Art. vii, Sec. 5.” 

Note. The valuable points of this court decision are that 
the court holds that such exercises need not be sectarian, do 
not convert the school into a place of worship or make it sec- 
tarian, or a religious society within the meaning of the con- 
stitution. ; 

This decision also holds that the school board is competent 
to decide the character of such exercises In following this rule 
the school board recently forbade the teaching of Evolution in 
the schools and ordered all mention of it deleted from the text 
books and the term “development” substituted for it. 


In the following states it is a more or less general 
practice by sufferance and custom without special law: 

Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of 
Columbia, Maryland, New Hampshire, North Carolina, 
Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Virginia and West 
Virginia. 

In Montana the same rule is in operation, but the 
Bible is seldom read. The custom is that where any 
objection is made the local school boards exclude it. 


158 Digest of Laws 


VERMONT 


_ In a Vermont case, which has been widely cited in cases 
involving religious rights, it was held that a pupil may be ex- 
cluded from school for absence without leave, though such ab- 
sence was for a religious purpose and in compliance with the 
parent’s wishes. 


NEW MEXICO 
Constitution Art. If Sec. IT 


Every man shall be free to worship God according to the 
dictates of his own conscience and no person shall ever be 
molested or denied any civil or political right or privilege on 
account of his religious opinion or mode of religious worship. 
No person shall be required to attend any place of worship or 
support any religious sect or denomination, nor shall any pre- 
ference be given by law to any religious denomination or mode 
of worship. 


Art. 12 Sec. 9 


No religious test shall ever be required as a condition of 
admission into the public schools or any educational institution 
of the State, either as teacher or student, and no teacher or stu- 
dent of such school or institution shall ever be required to at- 
tend or participate in any religious services whatsoever. 


School Laws—4983 
The Normal University . 


Said institution shall be forever strictly non-sectarian in its 
character and management, and no creed or system of religion 
shall be taught, practiced or exercised in it. 


This is the most positive set of specifications in any con- 
stitution, yet they have not so far been held to exclude the 
Bible reading from the public schools according to Bulletin 15 
of 1923, Department of the Interior. 


NEW YORK 


While the constitution of this state forbids religious teach- 
ing in the public schools, the reading of the Bible is permitted 
at the opening exercises providing they are held before the de- 
signated hour of opening and are voluntary as far as the pupils 
are concerned. The reading is thus left to the discretion of the 
teacher. 


The following information is furnished by the state De- 
partment of Education. 


In a decision rendered June 5th, 1872, Abram Weaver, 
State superintendent of public instruction, said: “There is no 
authority in the law to use, as a matter of right, any portion 
of the regular school hours in conducting any religious exer- 
cise, at which the attendance of the scholars is made compul- 
sory. On the other hand, there is nothing to prevent the read- 


Digest of Laws 159 


ing of the Scriptures or the performance of other religious 
exercises by the teacher in the presence of such of the scholars 
as may attend voluntarily, or by the direction of their parents 
or guardians, if it be done before the hour fixed for the opening 
of the school or after the dismissal of the school.” 


On May 27th, 1884, State Superintendent, W. B. Ruggles, 
rendered a decision of like nature. 


_ Section 1151 of the charter of New York City, permits 
Bible reading in the schools of that city. 


Section IIT 


In the following States the practice is forbidden by the 
Constitution or its interpretation by the courts. 


ARIZONA 


The State constitution (Art. XI, Sec. 7) prohibits sectarian 
instruction in the public schools, and the school laws make it 
unlawful for any public school teacher to “use any sectarian 
or denominational books, or teach any sectarian doctrine, or 
conduct any religious exercises in his school.” The State board 
of education has ruled that children should not be given any 
religious instruction at school during regular school hours. 
The question of holding such exercises outside of school time 
as in New York has not been raised. 


CALIFORNIA 


_ Two sections of the Constitution of California bear upon 
this subject. 


Article I, Section 4 


The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession and 
worship without discrimination or preference shall forever be 
guaranteed in this State. 


Sec. 8, Article 9. “Nor shall any sectarian or denominational 
doctrine be taught or instruction thereon be permitted directly 
or indirectly in any of the common schools of this State. 


A case pending in the Courts of that State since 1922, Evans 
vs. Selma Union High School District, which was decided in 
favor of Evans in the lower court, which excluded the Bible 
from all school libraries. The Supreme sitting court in Bank 
January 24, 1924, reversed this lower court and in substance 
said: 

The King James version of the Bible is not a sectarian, 
partisan or denominational publication, and that the mere plac- 
ing of copies thereof in a public school library is not contrary 
to the constitution and statute of California relating to re- 
ligious toleration and requiring school authorities to exclude 
from the public schools and school libraries all books and pub- 
lications or papers of a sectarian, partisan, or denominational 
character. 


160 Digest of Laws 


Note: The court avoids decision as to whether reading 
from the Bible to the pupils or using it as a basis for instruc- 
tion is permissible, and the present policy of the Superintendent 
of public instruction seems to be to allow the local Boards and 
teachers to go no further in this work than he is compelled to. 


As this book goes to press a campaign is on to amend the 
constitution. 


ILLINOIS 
Constitution 


Art. 11 Sec. 3. The free exercise and enjoyment of re- 
ligious profession and worship without discrimination shall for- 
ever be guaranteed; and no person shall be denied any civil 
or political right, privilege, or capacity on account of his re- 
ligious opinions; but the liberty of conscience hereby secured 
shall not be construed to dispense with oaths or affirmations, 
excuse acts of licentiousness, or justify practices inconsistent 
with the peace or safety of the State. No person shall be re- 
quired to attend or support any ministry or place of worship 
against his consent, nor shall any preference be given by law 
to any religious denomination or mode of worship. 


Article viii, Sec. 3. Neither the general Assembly nor any 
county, city, town, township, school district, or other public 
corporation shall ever make any appropriation, or pay from any 
public fund whatever, anything in aid of any church or sec- 
tarian purpose, or to help support or sustain any school, aca- 
demy, seminary, college, university, or other literary or scientific 
‘ institution controlled by any church or sectarian denomination 
whatever; nor shall any grant or donation of land, money, or 
other personal property ever be made by the State or any such 
public corporation to any church or for any sectarian purpose. 
The interpretation of the law then is 


(1) Free enjoyment of religious worship includes freedom 
not to worship. Section 3 of article 2 of the constitution, guar- 
anteeing “the free exercise and enjoyment of religious profes- 
sion and worship, without discrimination’ includes freedom 
from being compelled to join in any religious worship. 


(2) Children attending public school can not be compelled 
to join in religious worship. The reading of the Bible in the 
public schools, the singing of hymns and the repeating of the 
Lord’s prayer in concert, during which time the pupils are re- 
quired to rise, bow their heads and fold their hands, constitutes 
worship within the meaning of the constitution, and pupils can- 
not be compelled to join therein against their own or their 
parent’s wishes. 


(3) The constitution forbids giving sectarian instruction 
in public schools. The provision of section 3 of article 8 of 
the constitution forbidding the use of public school funds in 
aid of any sectarian purpose, is a prohibition of the giving of 
sectarian instruction in the public schools. 


Digest of Laws 161 


(4) Reading of the Bible in the public schools constitutes 
sectarian instruction. The reading of the Bible in public schools 
constitutes the giving of sectarian instruction within the mean- 
ing of section 3 of article 8 of the constitution.” 


LOUISIANA 
Article IV 


“Every person has the natural right to worship God accord- 
ing to the dictates of his conscience, and no law shall be passed 
respecting an establishment of religion.” 


By Court action in the Ross case, the school board was 
enjoined against enforcing a rule opening the schools by a 
reading from the Bible on the ground that a teacher could not 
read from the New Testament without giving instruction in 
Christianity and discriminating against the Jews. To the posi- 
tion “that such pupils might be excused” the Court replied “that 
such exclusion puts him in a class by himself, it subjects him 
to a religious stigma.” 


This was reaffirmed in Herrold vs. Parish Board. 


MISSOURI 
Constitution 
Article I, Section 5. 


That all men have a natural and indefeasible right to wor- 
ship Almighty God according to the dictates of their own con- 
science, that no person can on account of his. religious opinions 
be rendered ineligible to any office of trust or profit under the 
State. ... but the liberty of conscience hereby secured shall not 
be construed to excuse acts of licentiousness nor to justify 
practices inconsistent with the good order, peace or safety, of 
this State or with the rights of others.” 


Sec. 6. No person can be compelled to erect, support or 
attend any place or system of worship, or maintain or support 
any priest, minister, preacher or teacher of any sect, church, 
creed or denomination, but if any person shall voluntarily make 
a contract for any such object; he shall be held to the perform- 
ance of the same. 

Sec. 7. No money shall ever be taken from the public 
treasury directly or indirectly, in aid of any church, sect, or 
denomination of religion, or in any aid of any priest, minister, 
preacher or teacher, thereof, and no preference shall be given 
to, nor any discrimination made against, any church, sect, or 
creed of religion, or any form of religious faith or worship. 


This has been construed to exclude the reading of 
the Bible in the schools, but not to forbid giving school 
credits for Bible work done outside school hours or 


162 Digest of Laws 





the furnishing of sufficient helps to accredited teachers 
who are doing such work. 


NEVADA 
Article I, Section 4 


The free exercise and enjoyment of religious profession 
and worship without discrimination or preference shall forever 
be allowed in this state, and no person shall be rendered incom- 
petent to be a witness on account of his opinions on matters of 
religious belief, but the liberty of conscience hereby secured shall 
not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness or justify 
practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of this state. 


The State superintendent of public instruction reports that 
no Bible reading, except study of references in literature, is 
allowed in the public schools. The Nevada constitution provides 
that any district which allows “instruction of a sectarian char- 
acter’ in its school may be deprived of its proportion of the 
interest of the public school fund, and this has been construed 
as excluding Bible reading. This is an inference from the 
words of the constitution which has not yet been passed upon 
by the courts. 


UTAH 
Article I, Section 4 


No public money or property shall be appropriated for, or 
applied to any religious worship, exercise or instruction, or for 
the support of any ecclesiastical establishment. 


Article 10 Sec. 


The legislature shall provide for the establishment and 
maintenance of a uniform system of public schools, which shall 
be open to all children of the state and be free from sectarian 
control. 


Sec. 12. Neither religious or partisan tests or qualifications 
shall be required of any person as a condition of admission as 
a teacher or student into any public educational institution of 
the state. 


The State Superintendent gives the following interpretation 
of these provisions: 


The state constitution and statutes forbid religious or de- 
nominational instruction in the public schools. To avoid the 
practice of comments which could very well be more or less 
personal views, and to avoid interpretation which in many cases 
might easily be made by the manner of reading scriptural pas- 
sages, it has become customary to have no Bible reading in the 
schools of the state. 


Digest of Laws 163 


WASHINGTON 
Section IT 


Absolute freedom of conscience in all matters of religious 
belief, sentiment and worship, shall be guaranteed to every in- 
dividual and no one shall be molested or disturbed in person 
or property on account of religion, but the liberty of conscience 
hereby secured shall not be so construed as to excuse acts. of 
licentiousness or justify practices inconsistent with the peace 
and safety of the state. No public money or property shall be 
appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise or 
instruction or the support of any religious establishment. 
Amendment provided that this article shall not be so construed 
as to forbid the employment by the state of a chaplain for the 
state penitentiary and for such of the state reformatories as in 
the discretion of the legislature may seem justified. 

Extracts from the Code of Public Instruction, 1923: 


Article I, Section 11: * * * * No public money or property 
shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, 
exercise or instruction, or the support of any religious establish- 
ment. * * * * 


Article IX, Section 4: All schools maintained or supported 
wholly or in part by the public funds shall be forever free from 
sectarian contro] or influence. 


1. “The giving of credits for Bible study done outside of 
school, furnishing an outline of study, conducting examinations, 
and the rating of papers, covering the “historical, biographical, 
narrative and literary features of the Bible,” violates Const., 
Art. 1, Sec. 11, providing that no public money shall be applied 
to any religious worship, exercise or instruction.” State ex rel. 
Dearle v. Frazier, 102 Wash. 360. 


A campaign has been on for several years to amend the 
constitution. 


WISCONSIN 


Wisconsin Constitution, Art. I, sec. 18. The right of every 
man to worship Almighty God, according to the dictates of his 
own conscience, shall never be infringed; nor shall any man be 
compelled to attend, erect, or support any place of worship, or 
to maintain any ministry against his consent; nor shall any 
control of, or interference with, the rights of conscience be 
permitted, or any preference be given by law to any religious 
establishments, or modes of worship, nor shall any money be 
drawn from the treasury for the benefit of religious societies, 
or religious or theological seminaries. 


The use of any version of the Bible as a textbook in the 
public schools, and the stated reading thereof in such schools 
by the teachers, without restriction, though unaccompanied by 
any comment, has “a tendency to inoculate sectarian ideas,’ with- 
in the meaning of sec. 8 chapter 251, Laws of 1883, and is “sec- 


164 Digest of Laws 





fi] Permitter 


Ga Forbidden 
WHERE THE BIBLE IS READ OR EXCLUDED 


tarian instruction” within the meaning of sec. 3 Art. X Consti- 
tution. 

But textbooks founded upon the fundamental teachings of 
the Bible, or which contain extracts therefrom, and such por- 
tions of the Bible as are not sectarian may be used in the se- 
cular instruction of the pupils and to inculcate good morals. 

The fact that the petitioners are at liberty to withdraw 
from the school room during the reading of the Bible, does not 
remove the ground of complaint. 

The stated reading of the Bible as a textbook in the public 
schools may be worship, and the schoolhouse thereby become, 
for the time being, a “place of worship,” within the meaning 
Ofisecs 16; P Art, f= Cotse 

Such reading being religious instruction, the money drawn 
from the State treasury for the support of a school in which 
the Bible is so read is for the benefit of a “religious seminary,” 
within the meaning of said section. 


WYOMING 
Constitution—Article I 


Sec. 18. The free exercise and enjoyment of religious pro- 
fession and worship without discrimination or preference shall 
be forever guaranteed in this state, and no person shall be ren- 
dred incompetent to hold any office of trust or profit or to 
serve aS a witness or juror because of his opinion on any matter 
of belief whatever, but the liberty of conscience hereby secured 
shall not be so construed as to excuse acts of licentiousness or 
to justify practices inconsistent with the peace or safety of the 
state. 


Digest of Laws 105 


Sec. 19. No money of the state shall ever be given or 
appropriated to any sectarian or religious society or institution. 


Article VII 


No sectarian instruction, qualifications or tests shall be im- 
parted, exacted, applied or in any manner tolerated in the 
schools, of any grade or character, controlled by the state, nor 
shall attendance be required at any religious service therein, 
nor shall any sectarian tenets or doctrines be taught or favored 
in any public school or institution that may be established under 
this constitution. . 


The State Superintendent rules that this forbids 
the reading of the Bible in the public schools. 


GUBYOLAW 


In addition to these state laws forty-two of the 
large cities including New York and Baltimore have 
special charter provisions or legislation either permit- 
ting or requiring the reading of the Bible in the schools. 





The 
Christian Statesman 


A Magazine of 48 pages 
Established in 1867 
Is Published Monthly in Pittsburgh, Pa. 
sob 
The Official Organ of the 
NATIONAL REFORM ASS’N 
saute: 


It 1s devoted to the teaching of 


BIBLICAL PO LMMCGARSSGIENCE 


or 


The Application to the Civic Affairs 

of the United States that two-fifths | 

of the BIBLE which was given to 
THE CIVIL GOVERNMENT 


reli eng 


Editors: 
WM. PARSONS RICHARD CAMERON WYLIE 


Pre ili eng 


Subscription Price: 
To General Subscribers - - $2.00 
To Ministers - - - 1.50 


TERMS TO AGENTS FURNISHED UPON APPLICATION 





Publications of the 
National Reform Association 


BOOKS 
The Collapse of Christless Civilizations, by Richard 
Gameronts Wry omer rae ceca ceackee ttre eter ctelenare cs $ .50 
Brigham Young and His Mormon Empire, by Frank J. 
RALITIOL 6 CS MAEM Ale steece ORI een ett wicca Cine Ghee 6 cowie 1.00 
Digest of the Sabbath Laws, by Richard Cameron Wylie Apis: 
ADPIG Sed BVGiilOnemeetens Ceo sain an Pere Gece cistiee e LS 
A Manual of Civil Government, by David McAllister, 
DD eit caters sates ete Cloth $1. 25; Wrapped Manilla .60 
y The Bible Indispensible in Ih ducation, by S. M. Ellis, 
DDL) Sarees tel ie etahatar oot Cloth $1.00; Wrapped Manilla .40 
PAMPHLETS 
The Relation of the Civil Government To the 
BIDLG Eee, tocar tthe sc orci cRyode etka eyelets. Gir suse SOS ee S150 
IPHismUS mam C OTIStlaAnio Ns LlON Gemisis co ctse cities .05 3.50 
OhvistianwGiZenship ests cts ster. eee cl orelaaie cise. .05 150 
» Shall the Bible Reading Be Required ......... -06 eb O 
hie HatihnmOLehrGedOMin. 5 hiebaatads seer tein. che iene .05 1.50 
> The Protestant Right to Maintain Protestant 
ae USM comics Cc coc eto coe tare Chavedene coo) ser etenesete .05 1.50 
iWinye sl Weft, thes Mormon, Ghurchiaces stele pie 'sisieas ss .05 3.00 
The Treason of the Mormon Kingdom ........ 50D 1.50 
Ten Reasons Why Mormons Cannot Be Counted 
OUTUStIANISMES beware ee tere sachet cree se ch eb eeehet Seong it ates .05 3.50 
Mormonism Revealed In Government Investiga- 
CLOG arte reren anetolcs cite nave lecatenc ves ccrtane iene ve ah cre fo brs, sie .05 1.50 
_.. Polygamy and the Mormon Empire .......... .05 1.50 
EDISML SR OLLI Stl Are Na tLOMe cntan stetemener oie cecieme spate. .05 1.50 
LOmoI UT KN OWE GO Martti. 6 sre ttake tis icin sce sues .05 1.50 
ATCm DIV OLCOmOLIM Csr ar Werth sedi eth etaetuscuseey sent 2 :05 E50 
OCIA UTIL Mey deete els ence otls ier edey cneyel s/s) srereuaicre s .05 1.50 
SU NE SA DE oan by” Vas clk ances concent che erICn OME Gree nr eeLe eines .05 1.50 
PeOure tOrelonmi OPULALION UW eieace eo ctteu mers te sie, ces) oes 705 1.50 
THE NEW CHRISTIAN CIVIL GOVERNMENT SERIES 
TITLES 


By William Parsons, D.D. 


I. Wanted—A Christian Political Science. 
II. The Bible—Whose Book Is It? 
III. The Decisive National Act. 
IV. Religious and Moral Illiteracy. 
V. Our Civil Rest Day. 
VI. Federal Control of Family Relations. 


Reprints of Former Issues 


By J. S. Martin, D.D. 


VII. The National Reform Association. 
VIII. Christian Citizenship. 
IX. Mormonism Revealed by Government Investigation. 


We are offering this series of leaflets, 60 Pages, for 20c. 
In lots of 50 or more, $1.00 per hundred. 


For any of the above, address 


THE NATIONAL REFORM ASSOCIATION 
209 Ninth Street Pittsburgh, Pa. 





The National Reform Association 
Is an Organization 


Founded in 1867 


Chartered under the Laws of the State of 
Pennsylvania in 1907 


The Work of the Association is to teach that neg- 
cole phase of Christianity which presents the relation 
O 

JESUS CHRIST TOseTHE NATIONS OF Cae 
EARTH 





It is carried on by two departments. 


FIRST—The Publication Department, which uses re- 
gularly the Christian Statesman and such books 
and pamphlets as are used in presenting the GOS- 
PEL of the KINGDOM. 


SECOND—By a speakers’ department which maintains 


a force of lecturers who present this work in 
whatever locality it seems timely. 





The Practical Phases of Moral Reform Urged 
Especially are 

1. Law Enforcement, especially as regard Prohibi- 
tion. 

2. Uniform Marriage and Divorce Laws, under 
Federal Control. 
3. Better Sabbath Rest Day Laws. 

4. The BIBLE in the public schools. 
5. Clean Amusement for all the people. 





The Officers of the Association are 

President?) eee ee James S. Martin, D.D. 
Vice-President pie ie eee James A. Cossy, D.D. 
SECLKELATY iss. oak bee ee R. W. REDPATH 
DrVedgsurer ik. whee eee Knox M. Youne 
Assistants Tréasurer ict on tee HENRY PEEL 


The General Office of the Association is located at 
209 NINTH STREET, PITTSBURGH, PA. 

Any locality attempting to improve conditions in 

any of these lines of SOCIAL WELFARE will do 


well to correspond with the Association and secure 
their co-operation. 











Date Due 









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